Antisymmetrized molecular dynamics for heavy ion collisions

In order to calculate nuclear collisions as dynamics of quantum many-nucleon systems, we have developed a microscopic approach called antisymmetrized molecular dynamics (AMD). The original idea of AMD is to use Gaussian wave packets for nucleons with the full antisymmetrization, so that the Pauli principle is correctly treated. The simplest time evolution of the wave packet centroids is derived from the time-dependent variational principle. Furthermore, the quantum branching into many reaction channels has been taken into account by the stochasticity of dynamics. As the source of quantum branching, we have considered not only the two-nucleon collision effect but also the splitting into wave packets of the single-particle wave function evolving in the mean field. In this article, the theoretical development of AMD is reviewed, together with several applications for cluster formation reactions, including studies of the effects of the equation of state of isospin symmetric and asymmetric nuclear matter. The close relationship between the quantum statistics of AMD and the quantum branching is also emphasized.