Quantum tunneling and chaos in a driven anharmonic oscillator

Abstract

The Husimi distribution is computed for a particle in a double-well potential and an oscillatory driving force. The extended phase space of the classical system contains two disjoint stable tubes of regular orbits, embedded in a chaotic sea. For the quantum system we find coherent oscillatory tunneling between these stability tubes, at a rate many orders of magnitude greater than the rate of ordinary undriven tunneling.