Quantized Vibrational Relaxation from Stochastic Non-Markovian System-Bath Dynamics

In this contribution, we investigate the non-Markovian relaxation dynamics of a vibrating system in contact with a structured environment. Numerical simulations of the vibrational relaxation dynamics of an adsorbate coupled to a bath of phonons are performed using the stochastic multiconfiguration time-dependent Hartree method. Non-Markovian effects arise from the partitioning of the system-bath interaction into explicit and implicit contributions. It is shown that only a small number of explicit bath modes is sufficient to capture the short-time non-Markovian dynamics, and that imposing a "Markovian closure" of the weakly coupled explicit bath allows other physical regimes for the vibrational relaxation dynamics with distinctive signatures to be assessed.