Simple, accurate, and efficient implementation of 1-electron atomic time-dependent Schrödinger equation in spherical coordinates

Abstract

Modelling atomic processes in intense laser fields often relies on solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation (TDSE). For processes involving ionisation, such as above-threshold ionisation (ATI) and high-harmonic generation (HHG), this is a formidable task even if only one electron is active. Several powerful ideas for efficient implementation of atomic TDSE were introduced by H.G. Muller some time ago (Muller, 1999), including: separation of Hamiltonian terms into tri-diagonal parts; implicit representation of the spatial derivatives; and use of a rotating reference frame. Here, we extend these techniques to allow for non-uniform radial grids, arbitrary laser field polarisation, and non-Hermitian terms in the Hamiltonian due to the implicit form of the derivatives (previously neglected). We implement the resulting propagator in a parallel Fortran program, adapted for multi-core execution. Cost of TDSE propagation scales linearly with the problem size, enabling full-dimensional calculations of strong-field ATI and HHG spectra for arbitrary field polarisations on a standard desktop PC.