Chaotic effects in nuclear tunnelling phenomena

Ricardo A. Broglia, F. Barranco, E. Vigezzi

Flynn, Eric Douglas

Giovanni Jona-Lasinio, Carlo Presilla A, Federico Capasso

We describe a quantum many-body system undergoing multiple resonant tunneling which exhibits chaotic behavior in numerical simulations of a mean-field approximation. This phenomenon, which has no counterpart in the classical limit, is due to effective nonlinearities in the tunneling process and can be observed in principle with a heterostructure.

Christa M. Labadorf, Eugene F. Chaffin

Xuan Ni, Liang Huang, Ying‐Cheng Lai +1 more

We solve the Dirac equation in two spatial dimensions in the setting of resonant tunneling, where the system consists of two symmetric cavities connected by a finite potential barrier. The shape of the cavities can be chosen to yield both regular and chaotic dynamics in the classical limit. We find that certain pointer states about classical periodic orbits can exist, which suppress quantum tunneling, and the effect becomes less severe as the underlying classical dynamics in the cavity is chaotic, leading to regularization of tunneling dynamics even in the relativistic quantum regime. Similar phenomena have been observed in graphene. A physical theory is developed to explain the phenomenon based on the spectrum of complex eigenenergies of the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian describing the effectively open cavity system.

Akira Shudo, Kensuke S. Ikeda

For two examples of quantum chaological phenomena, the applicability of semiclassical theory to understanding their characteristics in terms of the corresponding classical dynamics is investigated. One is the well-known dynamical localization, and the other is a new class of phenomena we call chaotic tunneling. The present paper is devoted to a preliminary report of these investigations.