We utilize the multi Davydov-Ansatz, an Ansatz of the bosonic many-body wave function in terms of moving Gaussian basis functions, to illuminate several aspects of open quantum system dynamics and quantum many-body theory. By two artifices alongside the time-dependent variational principle we extract from this Ansatz, commonly considered ill-behaved and not converging, a highly stable and converging method. Its extremely favourable scaling of the numerical effort with the number of degrees of freedom facilitates exploration of the zero and non-zero temperature physics of both system and environment of open quantum systems in the strong coupling regime, even in cases where the system is laser-driven. The discovery that strongly coupling a system to an environment may, apart from the introduction of dissipation and decoherence also serve as a resource for the system has fuelled the research on strongly correlated open quantum systems. Although the advent of ultra powerful data processors enables advanced methods to tackle these systems, their explicit treatment without further assumptions remains an eminently challenging task. With the multi Davydov-Ansatz we numerically exactly calculate the dynamics of various open systems coupled strongly to an environment. In particular, we illuminate diverse aspects of laser-driven molecular dynamics in dissipative environments. Based on a rigorous investigation of the time-dependent variational principle for moving Gaussian basis functions, we systematically develop a linear algebra formulation of the system of equations of motion for the Ansatz parameters. On its basis we precisely isolate the origin of the issues related to the multi Davydov-Ansatz and solve the long-standing convergence problem of the method by a regularization termed apoptosis. We show exemplary for the ohmic and sub-ohmic Spin-Boson model that apoptosis renders the multi Davydov-Ansatz a highly stable method with an outstanding speed of convergence, suited to numerically exactly reproduce the dynamics of the model at surprisingly humble numerical effort even for strong coupling strengths. Furthermore, since they are not suited to efficiently reproduce Fock number states in many-body systems, we shed some light on possible extensions of the Gaussian basis functions in the multi Davydov-Ansatz in terms of displaced number states and in terms of squeezed states. In particular we argue that due to the emergence of an inappropriate number of equations of motion, there is no straightforward generalization of the multi Davydov-Ansatz by displaced number states. For the purpose of further optimization of the multi Davydov-Ansatz, we investigate in detail the impact on the numerical effort of different representations of an open system's environment. In particular, different frequency discretizations for given continuous spectral densities are examined with respect to the speed of convergence of the system dynamics to the continuum limit. We utilize a Windowed Fourier Transform as an a priori measure for the quality of the discretized representation of bath correlations. Furthermore, efficient representations of the environment for shifted initial conditions in general and non-zero temperature in particular are found systematically. As an alternative representation of an environment of mutually uncoupled harmonic oscillators, we investigate an environment represented in terms of a linear chain of effective modes. In this context we detail how to consistently reformulate the effective mode representation in second quantization, removing inadvertent double excitations introduced by the original formulation. We show that the alternative representation is beneficial in cases where the bath spectral density is highly structured, while for the ohmic and sub-ohmic spectral density of the Spin-Boson model it is of no advantage. Once we have identified the numerically most efficient representation of the environment, we apply the multi Davydov-Ansatz in order to illuminate several aspects of open quantum system dynamics whose investigation has previously remained occlusive. In particular, the access to the exact dynamics of the environmental degrees of freedom allows to shed light on the question for the channels through which energy can be interchanged between system and environment in the considered systems. Firstly, in a system-bath setup we survey the vibrational relaxation dynamics of deuterium dimers at a silicon surface. The investigation of the relaxation dynamics requires the quantum mechanical treatment of multiple system levels, which in turn prohibits a treatment of the environmental dynamics on a perturbative level. We demonstrate that the multi Davydov-Ansatz allows for a numerically exact calculation of the system dynamics with multiple system levels and a huge number of surface vibrations explicitly taken into account. Furthermore, due to the structure of the spectral density of the environment, the effective mode representation allows for this system to dramatically reduce the numerical effort. Secondly we shall investigate in detail the relaxation dynamics of an exciton in a one-dimensional molecular crystal. Since the strong coupling regime renders highly complicated the phonon dynamics, apoptosis turns out to be inevitably required in order to reliably converge the system dynamics. We show that the multi Davydov-Ansatz equipped with apoptosis allows for an extremely efficient calculation of the exciton and phonon dynamics, for both large hopping integrals and large molecular crystals. Furthermore we illuminate diverse aspects of laser-driven molecular dynamics in a dissipative environment. By restriction to two electronic energy levels we determine the channels through which system and environment interchange energy in the vicinity of an avoided crossing in a dissipative Landau-Zener model. In particular, we reveal that the final transition probability can be tuned by coupling to the environment for both diagonal and off-diagonal coupling. By appropriately adjusting the initial excitation of the system, the final transition probability is shown to converge to a fixed value for increasing coupling. Finally, we investigate in detail laser-induced population transfer by rapid adiabatic passage in a dissipative environment. By application of the multi Davydov-Ansatz it is shown for zero as well as for non-zero temperature that strongly coupling the system to an environment can serve as a resource for the population inversion. In particular, we shall examine how the coupling to the environment compensates for the decay channels in the system even if the laser pulse is only weakly chirped.:1. Introduction 2. Prerequisites 2.1. Harmonic oscillator basics 2.2. Canonical coherent states of the harmonic oscillator 2.3. Overcompleteness of CS and the Segal-Bargmann transformation 2.4. Density operator representation in terms of CS 2.5. Ideal squeezed states 2.6. Displaced number states 2.7. On the variational principle 3. Real time propagation with CS 3.1. Variational principle with CS 3.1.1. Gauge freedom in the vMCG Ansatz 3.1.2. Equations of motion for the vMCG Ansatz 3.2. Standard form of the linear system 3.3. Regularity of the coefficient matrix 3.3.1. Regularization in the case of vanishing coefficients 3.3.2. Apoptosis of CS 3.4. The route to Semiclassics 3.5. Variational principle with DNS and squeezed states 3.6. The multi Davydov-Ansatz 3.7. The multi Davydov-Ansatz at non-zero temperature 4. Open Quantum Systems 4.1. System-Bath Hamiltonian 4.2. The road to classical dissipation 4.3. The impact of apoptosis and regularization of the 𝜌-matrix 4.3.1. Multi Davydov-Ansatz for the Quantum Rabi model 4.3.2. Multi Davydov-Ansatz and the Spin-Boson model 4.3.2.1. Spin-Boson model in the ohmic regime 4.3.2.2. Spin-Boson model in the sub-ohmic regime 4.4. The Windowed Fourier Transform 4.5. The sub-ohmic case and the problem of oversampling 4.5.1. On the polarized initial condition 4.5.2. On the treatment of non-zero temperature 4.6. The Effective Mode Representation 5. Applications 5.1. Vibrational relaxation dynamics at surfaces 5.2. Relaxation dynamics of the Holstein polaron 5.3. The dissipative Landau Zener Model 5.3.1. Coupling to a single environmental mode 5.3.2. Coupling to multiple environmental modes 5.4. Rapid Adiabatic Passage with a dissipative environment 6. Summary And Outlook List of abbreviations Appendix A. Closure relation of displaced number states B. Hamilton equations: classical vs. CCS for a Morse oscillator C. Equations of motion for the multi Davydov-Ansatz C.1. D2-Ansatz C.2. D1-Ansatz D. Details of implementation E. Calculation of the BCF F. Calculation of the polarized initial condition for 𝑇 = 0 Bibliography List of publications

O Método da Coordenada Geradora Hartree-Fock Polinomial (pMCG-HF), desenvolvido por R.C. Barbosa e A.B.F. da Silva [1], é uma ferramenta matemática valiosa que permite gerar funções de base (também conhecidas como conjuntos de base). As funções de base geradas por este método têm um bom comportamento e são capazes de calcular valores precisos de propriedades eletrônicas moleculares. Porém, depois de gerar funções de base do hidrogênio até o flúor [2], fez-se necessário a adição de expoentes à função de base, correspondentes a cada átomo, para melhor adaptação à realização dos cálculos moleculares. Estas funções adicionais são o que chamamos de funções de polarização. A adição de funções de polarização, através de otimização computacional, é muito custosa, deste modo o desenvolvimento de uma regra de polarização para se esquivar desta otimização é de grande importância e por isso se transforma na beleza e no objetivo deste trabalho. Portanto, nesta dissertação, estudar-se-á um procedimento para escolher funções de polarização que reduza drasticamente o tempo computacional, no sentido de permitir uma seleção, mais simples, de expoentes da própria função de base primitiva para serem usadas nas funções de polarização p, d, f, g, etc. para a obtenção de propriedades moleculares calculadas através de métodos químico-quânticos / The polynomial generate coordinate method pGCM developed by R.C. Barbosa and A.B.F. da Silva [1] is an remarkble mathematic tool for the generation of basis functions (also known as basis sets). The basis sets generated from this method have a good behavior and are able to produce accurate values for electronic molecular properties. In fact, after generating a basis set [2] we need to add a set of exponent functions in order to better adequate a basis set to perform molecular calculations. These sets of additional functions are called polarizations functions. This work provides a methodology where the polarization functions are obtained from the initial basis set (the primitive set) without optimizing them separately by using optimization algorithms that are, computationally speaking, very costly. This procedure reduces drastically the computational time used to find polarization functions to be used in molecular quantum chemical calculations. Our methodology permits to choose the polarization functions directly from the primitive orbital exponents of each atomic symmetry s, p, d, f etc. in a very simple manner. The finding of polarization functions using our methodology was performed with several quantum chemical methods.

O Método da Coordenada Geradora Hartree-Fock Polinomial (pMCG-HF), desenvolvido por R.C. Barbosa e A.B.F. da Silva [1], é uma ferramenta matemática valiosa que permite gerar funções de base (também conhecidas como conjuntos de base). As funções de base geradas por este método têm um bom comportamento e são capazes de calcular valores precisos de propriedades eletrônicas moleculares. Porém, depois de gerar funções de base do hidrogênio até o flúor [2], fez-se necessário a adição de expoentes à função de base, correspondentes a cada átomo, para melhor adaptação à realização dos cálculos moleculares. Estas funções adicionais são o que chamamos de funções de polarização. A adição de funções de polarização, através de otimização computacional, é muito custosa, deste modo o desenvolvimento de uma regra de polarização para se esquivar desta otimização é de grande importância e por isso se transforma na beleza e no objetivo deste trabalho. Portanto, nesta dissertação, estudar-se-á um procedimento para escolher funções de polarização que reduza drasticamente o tempo computacional, no sentido de permitir uma seleção, mais simples, de expoentes da própria função de base primitiva para serem usadas nas funções de polarização p, d, f, g, etc. para a obtenção de propriedades moleculares calculadas através de métodos químico-quânticos / The polynomial generate coordinate method pGCM developed by R.C. Barbosa and A.B.F. da Silva [1] is an remarkble mathematic tool for the generation of basis functions (also known as basis sets). The basis sets generated from this method have a good behavior and are able to produce accurate values for electronic molecular properties. In fact, after generating a basis set [2] we need to add a set of exponent functions in order to better adequate a basis set to perform molecular calculations. These sets of additional functions are called polarizations functions. This work provides a methodology where the polarization functions are obtained from the initial basis set (the primitive set) without optimizing them separately by using optimization algorithms that are, computationally speaking, very costly. This procedure reduces drastically the computational time used to find polarization functions to be used in molecular quantum chemical calculations. Our methodology permits to choose the polarization functions directly from the primitive orbital exponents of each atomic symmetry s, p, d, f etc. in a very simple manner. The finding of polarization functions using our methodology was performed with several quantum chemical methods.

This thesis develops a computationally efficient way of employing Gaussian wave packets to study laser-induced electron dynamics in atomic and molecular systems by directly solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation (TDSE). First, we investigate charge migration (treating the nuclei classically), high-order harmonic generation (HHG), and single-isolated attosecond pulse generation in the Hydrogen molecular ion subjected to intense laser fields in a different range of frequencies with a basis of static coherent states (SCS). Then, seeking for a smarter way of constructing and guiding a minimal set of time-dependent basis functions, we introduce a fast and accurate approach for optimizing s-type Gaussian type orbitals (GTOs) and apply it to calculate electronic states of different 1D and 3D time-independent systems. Finally, we apply our optimization approach to time-dependent problems. With our approach we obtain excellent agreement with the exact results for HHG spectra of the 1D Hydrogen atom and molecular ion exposed to intense laser fields, which is not possible even with a much larger basis of static s-type GTOs. / Diese Arbeit sucht nach einem computereffizienten Ansatz für die Verwendung von Gaußschen Wellenpaketen zur Untersuchung der Quantenelektronendynamik in atomaren und molekularen laserinduzierten Systemen durch direkte Lösung der zeitabhängigen Schrödingergleichung (TDSE). Beginnend mit statischen kohärenten Zuständen (SCS) untersuchen wir die Ladungsmigration (wobei wir die Kerne klassisch behandeln), die Erzeugung von Oberwellen höherer Ordnung (HHG) und die Erzeugung von isolierten Attosekundenimpulsen im 3D-Wasserstoffmolekül-Ion \ih, das intensiven Laserfeldern in einem unterschiedlichen Frequenzbereich ausgesetzt ist. Auf der Suche nach einer intelligenteren Methode zur Konstruktion und Führung eines minimalen Satzes von Basisfunktionen stellen wir einen schnellen und genauen Ansatz zur Optimierung von Gauß-Orbitalen (GTOs) vom s-Typ vor und wenden ihn erfolgreich zur Berechnung gewünschter elektronischer Zustände verschiedener 1D- und 3D-Quantensysteme an. Letztendlich erweitern wir unseren Optimierungsansatz auf zeitabhängige Szenarien. Wir demonstrieren, wie diese Methode eine ausgezeichnete Übereinstimmung mit den exakten Ergebnissen in den HHG-Spektren des 1D-Wasserstoffatoms und des 1D-\ih, die intensiven Laserfeldern ausgesetzt sind, erzielt, wo die nicht optimierten s-Typ GTOs nicht übereinstimmen, selbst nach den ersten paar Harmonien im Plateaubereich.