On the accuracy of surface hopping dynamics in condensed phase non-adiabatic problems

We perform extensive benchmark comparisons of surface hopping dynamics with numerically exact calculations for the spin-boson model over a wide range of energetic and coupling parameters as well as temperature. We find that deviations from golden-rule scaling in the Marcus regime are generally small and depend sensitively on the energetic bias between electronic states. Fewest switches surface hopping (FSSH) is found to be surprisingly accurate over a large swath of parameter space. The inclusion of decoherence corrections via the augmented FSSH algorithm improves the accuracy of dynamical behavior compared to exact simulations, but the effects are generally not dramatic, at least for the case of an environment modeled with the commonly used Debye spectral density. (C) 2016 AIP Publishing LLC.