Purely magnetic tunneling effect in two dimensions

Abstract

The semiclassical magnetic Neumann Schr\"odinger operator on a smooth, bounded, and simply connected domain $\Omega$ of the Euclidean plane is considered. When $\Omega$ has a symmetry axis, the semiclassical splitting of the first two eigenvalues is analyzed. The first explicit tunneling formula in a pure magnetic field is established. The analysis is based on a pseudo-differential reduction to the boundary and the proof of the first known optimal purely magnetic Agmon estimates.