Surface hopping methods for nonadiabatic dynamics in extended systems

The review describes recent method developments toward application of the trajectory surface hopping approach for nonadiabatic dynamics simulations of extended systems. Due to the ease of implementation and good balance between efficiency and reliability, surface hopping has become one of the most widely used mixed quantum-classical methods for studying general charge and exciton dynamics. In extended systems (e.g., aggregates, polymers, surfaces, interfaces, and solids), however, surface hopping suffers from the difficulty to treat complex surface crossings in the adiabatic representation, and thus the relevant applications have been limited in the past years. The latest studies have allowed us to make a systematic classification of the surface crossings and identify their different influence mechanisms on the traditional surface hopping machinery, including problems related to the phase uncertainty correction of adiabatic states, the wave function propagation, the calculation of hopping probabilities, the velocity adjustment after surface hops, and the artificial long-range population transfer amplified by decoherence corrections. Elegant solutions to each of these problems have enabled us to get fast time step convergence and size independence even for very large systems with different strengths of electron-phonon couplings. Thereby, the recent theoretical progresses have opened the door to simulate the real-time and real-space dynamics (e.g., charge separation, recombination, relaxation, and diffusion) in realistic extended systems, and will generate comprehensive understanding to promote the development of many research fields in chemistry, physics, biology, and material sciences in the near future. This article is categorized under: Structure and Mechanism > Computational Materials Science Theoretical and Physical Chemistry > Reaction Dynamics and Kinetics Theoretical and Physical Chemistry > Statistical Mechanics Molecular and Statistical Mechanics > Molecular Dynamics and Monte-Carlo Methods