Description of tunneling with the help of coupled frozen Gaussians

A previous initial value coherent state representation is applied to Gaussian wave packet propagation on one-dimensional and two-dimensional double well potentials. The method uses a basis of trajectory guided frozen Gaussian coherent states, sampled from a Monte Carlo ensemble, for numerical solutions of the quantum time dependent integro-differential Schrodinger equation. Accurate tunneling splittings are obtained. Comparisons are also made with corresponding results obtained by the Herman-Kluk semiclassical initial value representation wave packet method. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.