Bounces and the calculation of quantum tunneling effects

Abstract

The imaginary part of the energy of the metastable ground state for the inverted double-well potential is calculated by using the path-integral method. The tunneling process is dominated by bounces. It is shown that the evaluation of the determinant of the second variation of the action at the bounce can be avoided, and that the imaginary part of the energy results directly from characteristic properties of the bounce itself, namely, the antisymmetry of its first time derivative under time reversal. The imaginary part of the result is in exact agreement with that of the well-known WKB calculation of Bender and Wu.