Macroscopic tunneling, decoherence and noise-induced activation

FERNANDO C. LOMBARDO, DIANA MONTEOLIVA AND PAULA I. VILLAR

Castello di Piombino, Toscana, Italia

Workshop; Third International Workshop DICE2006 " Quantum Mechanics between Decoherence and Determinism: new aspects from particle physics to cosmology"; 2006

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 Schr\"odinger 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.