ABSTRACT
In this chapter, a glimpse of the way how the concept of quantum
trajectories has been used in different areas of quantum chemistry
and chemical physics is provided. Putting aside ontological issues,
Bohmian mechanics has been exploited within these fields with
practical purposes, both analytical and computational. Analytically,
although quantum trajectories provide the same information at
a predictive level as standard quantum mechanics, they have
the advantage that one can follow and describe the evolution of
quantum systems by means of streamlines, whose results are less
vague and more intuitive than standard wave packet simulations.
On the other hand, computationally, Bohmian mechanics has been
the source of a number of numerical algorithms devised as an
alternative to other methods based on the wave function or the
probability density. This will be seen throughout the analysis
and discussion of different applications, which go from electronic
structure to chemical dynamics, thus covering essentially the
research spectrum of quantum chemistry and chemical physics.
Furthermore, in the form of a final summary, we present a unifying
scheme based on minimum principles, which allows us to connect
electronic structurewith classical and quantum (Bohmian) chemical
dynamics.
