Bosonic Condensed Phase Real-time Dynamics from Ring Polymer Molecular Dynamics

Abstract

We present a method for approximating real-time correlation functions and quantum transport coefficients of bosonic condensed phases. The direct evaluation of quantum real-time correlation functions in the path integral formulation is impossible due to a severe dynamical sign problem. Evaluating imaginary-time correlation functions and inverting them using analytic continuation is famously ill-posed. Ring polymer molecular dynamics (RPMD) provides an alternative approach resulting in accurate approximations for real-time correlation functions of condensed phases but neglects exchange effects. In this work, we develop a bosonic RPMD method, which is exact in the harmonic, short time, and high temperature limits. A critical enabling observation is that the Kubo-transformed correlation function for bosons is real only when the correlated observables are symmetric under exchange. We benchmark the method on harmonic and anharmonic model systems and then use it to directly obtain the Lieb-Liniger gas density-density real-time correlation functions at various temperatures and momentum transfers. This work enables the direct simulation of finite-temperature, real-time dynamics of large bosonic condensed phases using RPMD for the first time.