Precise variational tunneling rates for anharmonic oscillator with g<0

Abstract

We systematically improve the recent variational calculation of the imaginary part of the ground state energy of the quartic anharmonic oscillator. The results are extremely accurate as demonstrated by deriving, from the calculated imaginary part, all perturbation coefficients via a dispersion relation and reproducing the exact values with a relative error of less than $10^{-5}$. A comparison is also made with results of a Schrödinger calculation based on the complex rotation method.