Metastable diffusions with degenerate drifts

Abstract

We study the spectrum of the semiclassical Witten Laplacian $\Delta_{f}$ associated to a smooth function $f$ on ${\mathbb R}^d$. We assume that $f$ is a confining Morse--Bott function. Under this assumption we show that $\Delta_{f}$ admits exponentially small eigenvalues separated from the rest of the spectrum. Moreover, we establish Eyring-Kramers formula for these eigenvalues. Our approach is based on microlocal constructions of quasimodes near the critical submanifolds.