A justification for a nonadiabatic surface hopping Herman-Kluk semiclassical initial value representation of the time evolution operator.

A justification is given for the validity of a nonadiabatic surface hopping Herman-Kluk (HK) semiclassical initial value representation (SC-IVR) method. The method is based on a propagator that combines the single surface HK SC-IVR method [J. Chem. Phys. 84, 326 (1986)] and Herman's nonadiabatic semiclassical surface hopping theory [J. Chem. Phys. 103, 8081 (1995)], which was originally developed using the primitive semiclassical Van Vleck propagator. We show that the nonadiabatic HK SC-IVR propagator satisfies the time-dependent Schrodinger equation to the first order of variant Planck's over 2pi and the error is O(variant Planck's over 2pi(2)). As a required lemma, we show that the stationary phase approximation, under current assumptions, has an error term variant Planck's over 2pi(1) order higher than the leading term. Our derivation suggests some changes to the previous development, and it is shown that the numerical accuracy in applications to Tully's three model systems in low energies is improved.