Hamiltonian Dynamics of Semiclassical Gaussian Wave Packets in Electromagnetic Potentials

Abstract: We extend our previous work on symplectic semiclassical Gaussian wave packet dynamics to incorporate electromagnetic interactions by including a vector potential. The main advantage of our formulation is that the equations of motion derived are naturally Hamiltonian. We obtain an asymptotic expansion of our equations in terms of $\hbar$ and show that our equations have $\mathcal{O}(\hbar)$ corrections to those presented by Zhou, whereas ours also recover the equations of Zhou in the case of a linear vector potential and quadratic scalar potential. One and two dimensional examples of a particle in a magnetic field are given and numerical solutions are presented and compared with the classical solutions and the expectation values of the corresponding observables as calculated by the Egorov or Initial Value Representation (IVR) method. We numerically demonstrate that the $\mathcal{O}(\hbar)$ correction terms improve the accuracy of the classical or Zhou's equations for short times in the sense that our solutions converge to the expectation values calculated using the Egorov/IVR method faster than the classical solutions or those of Zhou as $\hbar \to 0$.