An Analysis of the Mapping Approach to Surface Hopping

Abstract: Recently, the mapping approach to surface hopping (MASH) was proposed as a method to simulate the non-adiabatic dynamics of two-level systems. It was shown that the method possesses many desirable qualities, both theoretically and through numerical simulations. We explain this success by proving that, out of similar mapping methods, MASH dynamics is unique in guaranteeing correct thermalisation, but that many different "estimators" can be used on top of it. We also show that MASH can successfully calculate multi-time correlation functions, which can be used for the simulation of 2D spectra. We also generalise an, in principle more accurate, technique known as the quantum jump procedure to these calculations and show that, contrary to expectations, it does not improve the results.