Macroscopic tunneling, decoherence and noise-induced activation

FERNANDO C. LOMBARDO & PAULA I. VILLAR

Journal of Physics: Conference Series

IOP Publishing

Año: 2007 vol. 67 p. 12027 - 12033

We study the effects of the environment at zero temperature on tunneling in an open system described by a static double-well potential. We show that the evolution of the system in an initial Schrodinger cat state, can be summarized in terms of three main physical phenomena, namely decoherence, quantum tunneling and noise-induced activation. Using large-scale numerical simulations, we obtain a detailed picture of the main stages of the evolution and of the relevant dynamical processes.