The computation of the semiclassical Schrödinger equation presents major challenges because of the presence of a small parameter. Assuming periodic boundary conditions, the standard approach consists of semi-discretisation with a spectral method, followed by an exponential splitting. In this paper we sketch an alternative strategy. Our analysis commences from the investigation of the free Lie algebra generated by differentiation and by multiplication with the interaction potential: it turns out that this algebra possesses structure that renders it amenable to a very effective form of asymptotic splitting: exponential splitting where consecutive terms are scaled by increasing powers of the small parameter. This leads to methods that attain high spatial and temporal accuracy and whose cost scales like O(M log M ), where M is the number of degrees of freedom in the discretisation.
We build efficient and unitary (hence stable) methods for the solution of the linear time-dependent Schrödinger equation with explicitly time-dependent potentials in a semiclassical regime. The Magnus-Zassenhaus schemes presented here are based on a combination of the Zassenhaus decomposition
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