The Semiclassical Description of Tunneling in Scattering with Multiple Degrees of Freedom

Abstract

We describe a computational investigation of tunneling at finite energy in a weakly coupled quantum mechanical system with two degrees of freedom. We compare a full quantum mechanical analysis to the results obtained by making use of a semiclassical technique developed in the context of instanton-like transitions in quantum field theory. This latter technique is based on an analytic continuation of the degrees of freedom into a complex phase space, and the simultaneous analytic continuation of the equations of motion into the complex time plane.