PATH INTEGRAL CALCULATION OF QUANTUM TUNNELING FOR CUBIC POTENTIAL AT FINITE TEMPERATURE
Zhang Yun-bo (张云波)ab, Liang Jiu-qing (梁九卿)ab, Pu Fu-cho (蒲富恪)ac
a Institute of Physics and Center for Condensed Matter Physics, Academia Sinica, Beijing 100080, China; b Department of Physics, Shanxi University, Taiyuan 030006, China; c Department of Physics, Guangzhou Normal College, Guangzhou 510400, China
Abstract The periodic instanton method is used to study the decay rates of metastable ground state and excited states of the cubic potential. The imaginary part of the energy is calculated through the standard procedure in the path-integral scheme. A formula of the decay rate valid for the entire region of energy is obtained. This formula provides a linkage between classical thermal activation at high temperatures and purely quantum tunneling at zero temperature. It is shown that in the low energy limit this more general result reduces exactly to the vacuum result. The temperature dependence of the decay rate agrees with earlier works in the literature.
Received: 17 November 1997
Accepted manuscript online:
Fund: Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Cite this article:
Zhang Yun-bo (张云波), Liang Jiu-qing (梁九卿), Pu Fu-cho (蒲富恪) PATH INTEGRAL CALCULATION OF QUANTUM TUNNELING FOR CUBIC POTENTIAL AT FINITE TEMPERATURE 1998 Acta Physica Sinica (Overseas Edition) 7 510
Altmetric calculates a score based on the online attention an article receives. Each coloured thread in the circle represents a different type of online attention. The number in the centre is the Altmetric score. Social media and mainstream news media are the main sources that calculate the score. Reference managers such as Mendeley are also tracked but do not contribute to the score. Older articles often score higher because they have had more time to get noticed. To account for this, Altmetric has included the context data for other articles of a similar age.
