Oscillatory Tunnel Splittings in Spin Systems: A Discrete Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin Approach
Abstract
Certain spin Hamiltonians that give rise to tunnel splittings that are viewed in terms of interfering instanton trajectories, are restudied using a discrete WKB method, that is more elementary, and also yields wavefunctions and preexponential factors for the splittings. A novel turning point inside the classically forbidden region is analysed, and a general formula is obtained for the splittings. The result is appled to the 8 system. A previous result for the oscillation of the ground state splitting with external magnetic field is extended to higher levels.
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