In today's SCL seminar, Antun Balaz presented extension of the discretized effective action approach to systems with time-dependent potentials. Such effective actions improve the convergence and speed up numerical calculation of path integrals.

The time-dependent generalization presented during the seminar includes derivation of the effective potential in the path integral formalism and using the recursion approach based on the Schrödinger equation for transition amplitudes. The effective potential is first derived for a simple one-particle one-dimensional system, and then generalized to many-body systems.

This approach is ideally suited for the study of quantum dynamics of systems in time-dependent external fields, rotating systems, or systems described by the Gross-Pitaevskii-type of equations.