ABSTRACT
This chapter presents development of a Bohmian trajectory-based approach for computing the quantum mechanical structure, energetics, and thermodynamics of multiatom systems. It reviews the salient features of the Bohmian approach, focusing upon how one might use it to develop new computational approaches for many-body systems. The chapter presents a variational approach that finds the quantum ground state for N-atom rare clusters using a statistical modeling approach for determining a best estimate of the quantum potential for a multidimensional system. It explores an efficient strategy for determining the quantum density associated with a statistical ensemble of space-time trajectories. The thermodynamics of small mesoscale systems is of considerable interest since what are typically extensive variables that scale monotonically with system size can exhibit anomalous behavior as the system size becomes small. The “node problem” has been a bugbear in the development of time-dependent quantum trajectory approaches and plagues Monte Carlo approaches.
