The latest results on effective actions for time-dependent potentials were presented at the DPG 2010 Spring Meeting, held from 21 to 26 March 2010 in Regensburg, Germany. In a recent paper by PI-BEC collaboration, the short-time expansion of the propagator for a general many-body quantum system in a time-dependent potential is calculated to high orders through a set of recursion relations for the effective potential. Such discretized effective potentials can be used to substantially speed up numerical Monte-Carlo simulations for path integrals, or to set up various analytic approximation techniques to study dynamic properties of quantum systems in time-dependent potentials.

The above results were presented by Antun Balaz at DPG10 in a talk "Fast Converging Path Integrals for Time-Dependent Potentials", given in the DY1 session of the Dynamics and Statistical Physics Division on 22 March 2010.