Phase Space Approach to Laser-driven Electronic Wavepacket Propagation

Abstract

We propose a phase space method to propagate a quantum wavepacket driven by a strong external field. The method employs the so-called biorthogonal von Neumann basis recently introduced for the calculation of the energy eigenstates of time-independent quantum systems [A. Shimshovitz and D.J. Tannor, arXiv:1201.2299v1]. While the individual elements in this basis set are time-independent, a small subset is chosen in a time-dependent manner to adapt to the evolution of the wavepacket in phase space. We demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the present propagation method by calculating the electronic wavepacket in a one-dimensional soft-core atom interacting with a superposition of an intense, few-cycle, near-infrared laser pulse and an attosecond extreme-ultraviolet laser pulse.