Abstract: The performances of absorbing boundary conditions (ABCs) in four widely used finite difference time domain (FDTD) methods, i.e. explicit, implicit, explicit staggered-time, and Chebyshev methods, for solving the time-dependent Schrdinger equation are assessed and compared. The computation efficiency for each approach is also evaluated. A typical evolution problem of a single Gaussian wave packet is chosen to demonstrate the performances of the four methods combined with ABCs. It is found that ABCs perfectly eliminate reflection in implicit and explicit staggered-time methods. However, small reflection still exists in explicit and Chebyshev methods even though ABCs are applied.

Key words: Finite difference time domain method,  absorbing boundary condition,  time-dependent Schrodinger