Time Dependent Density Functional Theory with Molecular Dynamics
Time-dependent local-density approximation plus ionic molecular dynamics
(This is a very short summary of our formal scheme. A most detailed description is found in [Rei03].)
The electron cloud is
described by density functional theory at the level of TDLDA.
The dynamical degrees of freedom are the set of occupied
single-electron wavefunctions .
The ions are treated by
classical MD and their degrees of freedom are the
positions RI and momenta PI
.
The starting point is the total energy given by:
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The electronic kinetic energy
employs the single-electron wavefunctions
which maintains the quantum mechanical shell effects. All
other electronic energies refer only to the local
spin-densities or total density
;
the Coulomb energy
naturally, and the exchange-correlation energy
by virtue of the LDA (often augmented by a self-interaction
correction (SIC) [Leg02]).
The electron-ion coupling
is realized by pseudo-potentials, mostly soft local ones [Kue00].
The ionic part
is composed of Coulomb interaction and kinetic energy.
Excitation mechanisms (laser, ionic collisions) are described
in
as external time-dependent potentials.
The coupled equations of motion are obtained in standard manner by variation. They read

where
is the spin orientation of the state
.
The equations imply a non-adiabatic coupling which goes beyond
usual Born-Oppenheimer approach. Non-adiabatic effects become
crucial in cluster dynamics induced by strong fields. The
numerical solution involves the representation of the
wavefunctions on a spatial grid, time-splitting for the
electronic propagation and the Verlet algorithm for MD, for
details see [Cal00]. The
obtained wavefunctions, densities, and ionic coordinates allow
to compute a wide variety of observables,
e.g.
optical absorption spectra [Cal97],
angular distributions [Poh04a],
emission spectra [Poh03],
or ionization [Ull98a]
for electronic degrees of freedom. The
ionic configurations can be measured indirectly
through optical response and its dynamics with various pump
and probe scenarios [And02].
Often, we use a semi-classical
description for the electronic dynamics at the level
of Vlasov-LDA, particularly for energetic processes and/or
large clusters. Instead of the
wavefunctions, the key ingredient becomes here the
one-electron phase-space distribution .
The quantum-mechanical propagation for the electrons is
replaced by the Vlasov equation

again non-adiabatically coupled to ionic motion as above.
Note that formally the same Kohn-Sham potential
is employed. For a derivation and justification from TDLDA see
[Dom97]. The Vlasov-LDA
equation is solved with the test-particle method where the
distribution function
is represented as a sum of Gaussian test-particles which are
propagated again by the Verlet algorithm [Gig02].
The semi-classical description makes it feasible to include dynamical correlations from electron-electron collisions. This is achieved by adding an Uehling-Uhlenbeck collision term leading to

The collision term
is a non-linear functional of the distribution function
.
It contains terms up to third power in
.
It is constructed from local and instantaneous collisions
which obey energy conservation, momentum conservation, and the
Pauli principle [Gig02].
The resulting equation is called the Vlasov-Uehling-Uhlenbeck
approach (VUU).
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