Finite-difference approach to solving operator equations of motion in quantum theory

We study the application of the "leapfrog" method of finite differencing to the approximate solution of operator equations of motion in quantum theory. We show that, for a wide class of linear and nonlinear systems, the leapfrog differencing scheme is exactly unitary. The method is sufficiently general to apply to many-particle systems with arbitrary potential forces and to lattice-regulated nonlinear $\sigma$ models and non-Abelian gauge theories. In contrast to the recent proposal of Bender and Sharp (which is based on the finite-elements method) our approach is explicit rather than implicit and, in the case of lattice-regulated field theories, has a lattice analog of microcausality. For systems with finitely many degrees of freedom and self-adjoint Hamiltonians, we show that our approximate solutions converge to the exact solutions in the limit in which the time step tends to zero.