An accurate pentadiagonal matrix solution for the time-dependent Schr\"{o}dinger equation

Abstract

One of the unitary forms of the quantum mechanical time evolution operator is given by Cayley's approximation. A numerical implementation of the same involves the replacement of second derivatives in Hamiltonian with the three-point formula, which leads to a tridiagonal system of linear equations. In this work, we invoke the highly accurate five-point stencil to discretize the wave function onto an Implicit-Explicit pentadiagonal Crank-Nicolson scheme. It is demonstrated that the resultant solutions are significantly more accurate than the standard ones.Comment: For a numerical implementation in python, see https://github.com/vyason/Cayley-TDS