Quantum dynamics through conical intersections in macrosystems: Combining effective modes and time-dependent Hartree

We address the nonadiabatic quantum dynamics of (macro)systems involving a vast number of nuclear degrees of freedom (modes) in the presence of conical intersections. The macrosystem is first decomposed into a system part carrying a few, strongly coupled modes, and an environment, comprising the remaining modes. By successively transforming the modes of the environment, a hierarchy of effective Hamiltonians for the environment can be constructed. Each effective Hamiltonian depends on a reduced number of effective modes, which carry cumulative effects. The environment is described by a few effective modes augmented by a residual environment. In practice, the effective modes can be added to the system's modes and the quantum dynamics of the entire macrosystem can be accurately calculated on a limited time-interval. For longer times, however, the residual environment plays a role. We investigate the possibility to treat fully quantum mechanically the system plus a few effective environmental modes, augmented by the dynamics of the residual environment treated by the time-dependent Hartree (TDH) approximation. While the TDH approximation is known to fail to correctly reproduce the dynamics in the presence of conical intersections, it is shown that its use on top of the effective-mode formalism leads to much better results. Two numerical examples are presented and discussed; one of them is known to be a critical case for the TDH approximation.