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Physical Review Letters

Quantum tunneling and chaos in a driven anharmonic oscillator

W. A. Lin, L. E. Ballentine

Published Dec 10, 1990• 293 citations
Publisher

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.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.65.2927

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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.
The quantum dynamics of a particle in a double-well potential under a monochromatic external driving force is computed by using a minimum-uncertainty Gaussian wave packet as an initial state. Irregular or regular time development of dynamical variables is obtained, depending on whether the initial wave packet is located in the classical chaotic sea or the regular region in phase space, respectively. Tunnelings between nonresonant islands and between resonant islands are obtained. Tunneling times between nonresonant islands decrease smoothly, in general, with the increase of the amplitude of the driving force, but tunneling times between resonant islands are more erratic.
Quantum tunneling rates through a barrier separating two-dimensional, symmetric, double-well potentials are shown to depend on the classical dynamics of the billiard trajectories in each well and, hence, on the shape of the wells. For shapes that lead to regular (integrable) classical dynamics the tunneling rates fluctuate greatly with eigenenergies of the states sometimes by over two orders of magnitude. Contrarily, shapes that lead to completely chaotic trajectories lead to tunneling rates whose fluctuations are greatly reduced, a phenomenon we call regularization of tunneling rates. We show that a random-plane-wave theory of tunneling accounts for the mean tunneling rates and the small fluctuation variances for the chaotic systems.
The interplay between classical chaos and quantum tunneling is examined in driven nonlinear systems, with emphasis on how semi classical phase space structures influence purely quantum transport phenomena. We show that, in the presence of external driving and stochastic perturbations, tunneling rates acquire an activated form determined by effective classical barriers, providing a transparent link between chaotic dynamics and quantum tunneling. Within this framework, chaos assisted tunneling and coherent destruction of tunneling emerge as closely related manifestations of the same underlying phase space restructuring and interference effects induced by driving. The results offer a unified perspective on tunneling control in non integrable systems and remain relevant for modern studies of driven quantum dynamics and decoherence resistant transport.
The study of quantum tunneling dates back to the early days of quantum mechanics, and has been a major topic of investigation in both theory and experiment. In recent years, there has been significant effort to understand tunneling phenomena for systems that exhibit chaos in their classical counterpart [13,15,18,29,42]. In particular, tunneling was predicted for mixed systems where chaotic and stable regions are intermingled [14]. The tunneling in this case is between two stable regions (referred to as nonlinear resonances, or islands of stability) in the classical phase space. The classical transport between these islands is forbidden by “dynamical barriers” in phase space. In contrast, quantum tunneling can couple the two islands so that a wave packet oscillates coherently between the two symmetry-related regions. This phenomenon is called dynamical tunneling because it occurs in phase space, without a fixed potential barrier. In the case of a mixed phase space, the presence of the chaotic region can enhance the rate of dynamical tunneling, a phenomenon known as chaos-assisted tunneling [53]. In this chapter, we review our experimental observation of chaosassisted tunneling with ultracold cesium atoms [48-51]. We first give a brief overview of some basic concepts and of earlier work in order to provide a context for our results.
We study a wavepacket tunneling in one-dimensional periodically driven double-well system using entangled trajectory molecular dynamics method. The tunneling dynamics dependents on the amplitude and frequency of the driven force are present. Both resonant and nonresonant tunneling process are enhanced by the driven force when the system is chaotic under classical dynamics. We give entangled trajectory in phase space compared to corresponding classical trajectory with same initial state to visually show quantum tunneling process. The average values of quantum tunneling probability after long time evolution have been shown in the parameter spaces, the effect of resonance and chaos on the tunneling dynamics are present. The relation between chaos and the uncertainly product is discussed in the end. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
We present effects of an external driving on the tunneling dynamics of interacting bosons confined in a double-well potential. At large values of a periodic driving potential, the dynamics become chaotic, with a distinct difference between tuning of the amplitude or the phase of the driving term with regard to the route leading to chaos. For example, we find that a controlled increase in the amplitude of the driving term with a fixed phase leads to quasiperiodic route to chaos. While tuning of the frequency with a fixed (large) amplitude leads to a crisis-induced intermittency route to a chaotic dynamics, where the system intermittently visits different attractors in the phase space. Surprisingly, a chirp frequency superposed on a harmonic signal suppresses the chaotic motion, thereby yielding an orderly dynamics, pretty similar to a (damped) Rabi oscillation.