QUANTUM STOCHASTIC APPROACH FOR MOLECULE SURFACE SCATTERING .1. ATOM PHONON INTERACTIONS

We present a general, fully quantum mechanical theory for molecule surface scattering at finite temperature within the time dependent Hartree (TDH) factorization. We show the formal manipulations which reduce the total molecule-surface-bath Schrodinger equation into a form which is computationally convenient to use. Under the TDH factorization, the molecular portion of the wavefunction evolves according to a mean-field Hamiltonian which is dependent upon both time and temperature. The temporal and thermal dependence is due to stochastic and dissipative terms that appear in the Heisenberg equations of motion for the phonon operators upon averaging over the bath states. The resulting equations of motion are solved in one dimension self consistently using quantum wavepackets and the discrete variable representation. We compute energy transfer to the phonons as a function of surface temperature and initial energy and compare our results to results obtained using other mean-field models, namely an averaged mean-field model and a fully quantum model based upon a dissipative form of the quantum Liouville equation. It appears that the model presented here provides a better estimation of energy transfer between the molecule and the surface.