SU(3) semiclassical representation of quantum dynamics of interacting spins

Abstract: We present a formalism for simulating quantum dynamics of lattice spin-one systems by first introducing local hidden variables and then doing semiclassical (truncated Wigner) approximation in the extended phase space. In this way we exactly take into account the local on-site Hamiltonian and approximately treat spin-spin interactions. In particular, we represent each spin with eight classical SU(3) variables. Three of them represent the usual spin components and five others are hidden variables representing local spin-spin correlations. We compare our formalism with exact quantum dynamics of fully connected spin systems and find very good agreement. As an application we discuss quench dynamics of a Bose-Hubbard model near the superfluid-insulator transition for a 3D lattice system consisting of 1000 sites.