Quantum corrections to classical evaluation of nonadiabatic transition rates

Abstract

A recently developed quantum correction approach is applied to evaluating the nonadiabatic quantum-mechanical transition rate between Born-Oppenheimer states of a subsystem embedded in a thermal bath of harmonic oscillators. In the first-order perturbation theory, the nonadiabatic rate can be expressed in terms of a quantum-mechanical correlation function, which can be estimated directly from classical data. Application to a popular spin-boson model shows that our results are in excellent agreement with the exact quantum-mechanical results.