Collisional semiclassical approximations in phase-space representation

The Gaussian wave-packet phase-space representation is used to show that the expansion in powers of ħ of the quantum Liouville propagator leads, in the zeroth-order term, to results close to those obtained in the statistical quasiclassical method of Lee and Scully in the Weyl-Wigner picture. It is also verified that, propagating the Wigner distribution along the classical trajectories, the amount of error is less than that coming from propagating the Gaussian distribution along classical trajectories. © 1997 The American Physical Society.