Hiroki Nakamura - Böcker

Quantum mechanical tunneling plays important roles in a wide range of natural sciences, from nuclear and solid-state physics to proton transfer and chemical reactions in chemistry and biology. Responding to the need for further understanding of multidimensional tunneling, the authors have recently developed practical methods that can be applied to multidimensional systems. Quantum Mechanical Tunneling in Chemical Physics presents basic theories, as well as original ones developed by the authors. It also provides methodologies and numerical applications to real molecular systems. The book offers information so readers can understand the basic concepts and dynamics of multidimensional tunneling phenomena and use the described methods for various molecular spectroscopy and chemical dynamics problems. The text focuses on three tunneling phenomena: (1) energy splitting, or tunneling splitting, in symmetric double well potential, (2) decay of metastable state through tunneling, and (3) tunneling effects in chemical reactions. Incorporating mathematics to explain basic theories, the text requires readers to have graduate-level math to grasp the concepts presented.The book reviews low-dimensional theories and clarifies their insufficiency conceptually and numerically. It also examines the phenomenon of nonadiabatic tunneling, which is common in molecular systems. The book describes applications to real polyatomic molecules, such as vinyl radicals and malonaldehyde, demonstrating the high efficiency and accuracy of the method. It discusses tunneling in chemical reactions, including theories for direct evaluation of reaction rate constants for both electronically adiabatic and nonadiabatic chemical reactions. In the final chapter, the authors touch on future perspectives.

Nonadiabatic transition is a highly multidisciplinary concept and phenomenon, constituting a fundamental mechanism of state and phase changes in various dynamical processes of physics, chemistry and biology, such as molecular dynamics, energy relaxation, chemical reaction, and electron and proton transfer. Control of molecular processes by laser fields is also an example of time-dependent nonadiabatic transition. Thus, nonadiabatic transition represents one of the very basic mechanisms of the mutability of the world. This book has been written because the complete analytical solutions to the basic problem have recently been formulated by the author.

Nonadiabatic transition is a highly multi-disciplinary concept and phenomenon, constituting a fundamental mechanism of state and phase changes in various dynamical processes of physics, chemistry and biology. This book is intended to be readable to a broad audience so that they can deepen their understanding of the basic concepts of both time-independent and time-dependent nonadiabatic transitions. Quantum mechanically intriguing phenomena such as complete reflection and nonadiabatic tunneling are emphasized. The Zhu-Nakamura theory that can deal with non-negligible classically forbidden transitions is explained. Furthermore, by controlling nonadiabatic transitions induced by an external field such as laser, designing chemical reaction dynamics as we desire is shown to be theoretically possible.

Various quantum mechanical effects such as nonadiabatic transition, tunneling, and interference phenomena play crucial roles in chemical and biological systems. Semiclassical molecular dynamics is an attempt to properly treat these effects in computational simulations, and this book presents and explains how this may be achieved with the use of new methods and theoretical frameworks developed by the authors. This semiclassical approach could provide a powerful step forward to tackle and clarify the quantum dynamics in large chemical and biological systems, which is currently not feasible by the full quantum mechanical methods.

Laser control of chemical dynamics is one of the active research fields in molecular science, brought about by significant advances in laser technology and further development of quantum control theory. This monograph features the author's outstanding contributions to the field. The first four chapters provide an excellent review of the fundamental subjects that are crucial to understanding laser-molecule interactions, with the highlight being his Zhu-Nakamura theory of nonadiabatic transition. This is an important basic theory for describing processes relevant to laser control, and has been used by scientists around the world because of its simplicity and accuracy. The remaining chapters propose theoretical possibilities of controlling various chemical dynamic processes based on theories discussed earlier in the book.