Remarkable progress has recently been made in the application of quantumtrajectories as the computational tool for solving quantum mechanical problems. This is the first book to present these developments in the broader context of the hydrodynamical formulation of quantum dynamics. In addition to a thorough discussion of the quantum trajectory equations of motion, there is considerable material that deals with phase space dynamics, adaptive moving grids, electronic energy transfer, and trajectories for stationary states.

On the pedagogical side, a number of sections of this book will be accessible to students who have had an introductory quantum mechanics course. There is also considerable material for advanced researchers, and chapters in the book cover both methodology and applications. The book will be useful to students and researchers in physics, chemistry, applied math, and computational dynamics.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.0 based on 1 review)

Well written, but with some disappointment

This is a well written book by a leader in the field on the subject. The author has included a mix of theory, computation, and history that gives the reader a broad depth of understanding of, not just what Bohmian mechanics is all about, but how to go about writing a computer program to simulate quantum dynamics using the hydrodynamic equations. As a computational chemist I am delighted to see books written in a more modern way by focusing on computation instead of the traditional theoretical approach. It's no trivial task going from knowing how to write down the correct time-dependent Schroedinger equation to propagating a gaussian wavepacket, even for simple model problems. The book contains numerous examples ranging from bound states, scattering, and even electronically non-adiabatic problems. Most of the examples are taken from published studies, primarily by the author.

A big reason for purchasing this text, as opposed to just reading all the available literature on the subject, was the inclusion of an example QTM "program". This is where I was most disappointed. The program in the appendix is incomplete. It doesn't even include the most critical part of the quantum trajectory method, evaluation of the spatial derivatives. The call to the generic deriv routine appears to use all the grid points in the evaluation of spatial derivatives at each reference point. You wouldn't want to do this as it adds considerable numerical errors, especially at the end points and in regions where the function is rapidly varying. Much of what this book should have discussed I had to learn by trial and error doing my own coding. The inclusion of a complete working code with a few pages devoted to describing it and how to use it is what this book needed. It's very misleading to a purchaser to include in the contents section "Example QTM Program" and then end up providing nothing more than a pseudocode description of the method. The author should make a complete working and functional QTM program available on his website.

Since Professor Wyatt is a computational chemist I was expecting to see more chemistry applications. Too much of the book focused on harmonic oscillators, uphill/downhill ramp potentials, scattering through an Eckart potential, etc ... What about the H + H2 reaction, or scattering cross-sections? This book deserves more stars if it were more complete and something additional to the available published literature. I wouldn't recommend purchasing this book unless you simply don't have the motivation to read the available literature on the subject (and there's really not a lot of literature out there yet). I hate to give this book just 3 stars because it is very readable and well put together, it just failed where it should have excelled.
November 23, 2008

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