Low-order polynomial approximation of propagators for the time-dependent Schrödinger equation (Q1195470)

This paper is an extremely interesting study of polynomial approximations for propagating the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. First and second-order Magnus expansions are tested for approximating the time ordering operator and the second-order expansion is found to be significantly better regardless of the method used. Two methods are used one of which is proved to be equivalent to the short time iterative Lanczos procedure. The second method which uses a different optimization scheme is found to be significantly superior in the examples used but further work is needed to establish this generally. It is believed that the second method is superior since it includes some information about the form of the function although it is not obvious why this should be generally better.