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Journal of Physics A Mathematical and General

Improving the variational path integral approach to the quantum double-well potential

Jing-Dong Bao, Hongyu Wang

Published Aug 7, 2002• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

An improved variational path integral approach is developed and applied to the quantum double-well potential, in which part of the quartic term of the potential is included in the trial action. The expression of the effective classical potential (ECP) under a non-Gaussian expectation is obtained. Here the frequency and fourth-order derivative of the potential are treated as two variational parameters, determined by the minimization of the ECP at each point. We calculate the ECP, the free energy and the level splitting of a symmetrical double-well potential. It is shown that the present results are better than those of the Feynman–Kleinert Gaussian variational method.

DOI
10.1088/0305-4470/35/33/305

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The modified version of second and fourth order vibrational perturbation theory, whereby the Euclidean action for tunneling is computed on the inverted potential at a shifted energy that is ℏ2 dependent, is applied to a symmetric double well quartic potential. The mean energies of the doublets in each well are also computed using vibrational perturbation theory. Results show that the modified vibrational perturbation theory significantly improves the estimates of tunneling splitting energies both for the ground state and for excited state doublets.
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We present an effective potential that allows quantum thermal expectation values of a position-dependent observable to be estimated as a classical ensemble average of the corresponding function. We follow the approach of Feynman and Hibbs, but perform the mean-field treatment of quantum fluctuations about the path starting point rather than the path centroid. Furthermore, rather than performing a full variational optimization of the potential, we explore approximate functional forms that yield a numerical robustness. The resulting closed-form potential is exact in the classical and harmonic limits; benchmarks against exact position distributions for one-dimensional quartic, Morse, and double-well potentials, show good agreement for potentials with harmonic support.