Summing Non-Borel Tunnelling Amplitudes by Variational Perturbation Theory

Abstract

We present a method for extracting tunnelling amplitudes from perturbation expansions which are always divergent and not Borel-summable. We show that they can be evaluated by an analytic continuation of variational perturbation theory. The power of the method is illustrated by calculating the imaginary parts of the partition function of the anharmonic oscillator in zero spacetime dimensions and of the ground state energy of the anharmonic oscillator for all negative values of the coupling constant $g$ and show that they are in excellent agreement with the exactly known values. As a highlight of the theory we recover from the divergent perturbation expansion of the tunnelling amplitude the action of the instanton and the effects of higher loop fluctuations around it.