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We derive the non-adiabatic ring polymer molecular dynamics (RPMD) approach in the phase space of the SU(N) Lie Group. This method, which we refer to as the spin mapping non-adiabatic RPMD (SM-NRPMD), is based on the spin-mapping formalism for the electronic degrees of freedom (DOFs) and ring polymer path-integral description for the nuclear DOFs. Using the Stratonovich-Weyl transform for the electronic DOFs, and the Wigner transform for the nuclear DOFs, we derived an exact expression of the Kubo-transformed time-correlation function (TCF). We further derive the spin mapping non-adiabatic Matsubara dynamics using the Matsubara approximation that removes the high frequency nuclear normal modes in the TCF and derive the SM-NRPMD approach from the non-adiabatic Matsubara dynamics by discarding the imaginary part of the Liouvillian. The SM-NRPMD method has numerical advantages compared to the original NRPMD method based on the MMST mapping formalism, due to a more natural mapping using the SU(N) Lie Group that preserves the symmetry of the original system. We numerically compute the Kubo-transformed position auto-correlation function and electronic population correlation function for three-state model systems. The numerical results demonstrate the accuracy of the SM-NRPMD method, which outperforms the original MMST-based NRPMD. We envision that the SM-NRPMD method will be a powerful approach to simulate electronic non-adiabatic dynamics and nuclear quantum effects accurately.

We provide the analytic expressions of the totally symmetric and anti-symmetric structure constants in the $\mathfrak{su}(N)$ Lie algebra. The derivation is based on a relation linking the index of a generator to the indexes of its non-null elements. The closed formulas obtained to compute the values of the structure constants are simple expressions involving those indexes and can be analytically evaluated without any need of the expression of the generators. We hope that these expressions can be widely used for analytical and computational interest in Physics.

We present a new non-adiabatic ring polymer molecular dynamics (NRPMD) method based on the spin mapping formalism, which we refer to as the spin-mapping NRPMD (SM-NRPMD) approach. We derive the path-integral partition function expression using the spin coherent state basis for the electronic states and the ring polymer formalism for the nuclear degrees of freedom (DOFs). This partition function provides an efficient sampling of the quantum statistics. Using the basic property of the Stratonovich-Weyl transformation, we derive a Hamiltonian which we propose for the dynamical propagation of the coupled spin mapping variables and the nuclear ring polymer. The accuracy of the SM-NRPMD method is numerically demonstrated by computing nuclear position and population auto-correlation functions of non-adiabatic model systems. The results from SM-NRPMD agree very well with the numerically exact results. The main advantage of using the spin mapping variables over the harmonic oscillator mapping variables is numerically demonstrated, where the former provides nearly time-independent expectation values of physical observables for systems under thermal equilibrium, the latter can not preserve the initial quantum Boltzmann distribution. We also explicitly demonstrate that SM-NRPMD provides invariant dynamics upon various ways of partitioning the state-dependent and state-independent potentials.

The reaction between D$^+$ and H$_2$ plays an important role in astrochemistry at low temperatures and also serves as a prototype for simple ion-molecule reaction. Its ground $\tilde{X}~^1A^{\prime}$ state has a very small thermodynamic barrier (up to 1.8$\times 10^{-2}$ eV) and the reaction proceeds through the formation of an intermediate complex lying within the potential well of depth of at least 0.2 eV thus representing a challenge for dynamical studies. In the present work, we analyze the title reaction within the temperature range of 20 $-$ 100 K by means of ring polymer molecular dynamics (RPMD) and quasi-classical trajectory (QCT) methods over the full-dimensional global potential energy surface developed by Aguado et al. [A. Aguado, O. Roncero, C. Tablero, C. Sanz, and M. Paniagua, J. Chem. Phys., 2000, 112, 1240]. The computed thermal RPMD and QCT rate coefficients are found to be almost independent of temperature and fall within the range of 1.34 $-$ 2.01$\times$10$^{-9}$ cm$^3$ s$^{-1}$. They are also in a very good agreement with the previous time-independent quantum mechanical and statistical quantum method calculations. Furthermore, we observe that the choice of asymptotic separation distance between the reactants can markedly alter the rate coefficient in the low temperature regime (20 $-$ 50 K). Therefore it is of utmost importance to correctly assign the value of this parameter for dynamical studies, particularly at very low temperatures of astrochemical importance. We finally conclude that experimental rate measurements for the title reaction are highly desirable in future.