Abstract
We study the application of the "leapfrog" method of finite differencing to the approximate solution of operator equations of motion in quantum theory. We show that, for a wide class of linear and nonlinear systems, the leapfrog differencing scheme is exactly unitary. The method is sufficiently general to apply to many-particle systems with arbitrary potential forces and to lattice-regulated nonlinear $\ensuremath{\sigma}$ models and non-Abelian gauge theories. In contrast to the recent proposal of Bender and Sharp (which is based on the finite-elements method) our approach is explicit rather than implicit and, in the case of lattice-regulated field theories, has a lattice analog of microcausality. For systems with finitely many degrees of freedom and self-adjoint Hamiltonians, we show that our approximate solutions converge to the exact solutions in the limit in which the time step tends to zero.
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