Guided Gaussian wave packets.
We discuss several semiclassical Gaussian wave packet approaches with emphasis on one that is not very well-known, that is, the off-center guiding approach. Off-center guiding of (thawed) Gaussian wave packets uses the same information as other Gaussian propagation schemes, that is, the full van Vleck determinant and multiple trajectories. It retains the well-known caustic smoothing property of Gaussians. The off-center guiding of Gaussians can handle hard chaos and other highly nonlinear situations, where the van Vleck propagator, for example, has over 30,000 separate branches.
Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
E J
EJ
Heller