Tunnel effect and symmetries for Kramers Fokker-Planck type operators

Abstract

We study operators of Kramers-Fokker-Planck type in the semiclassical limit, assuming that the exponent of the associated Maxwellian is a Morse function with a finite number $n_0$ of local minima. Under suitable additional assumptions, we show that the first $n_0$ eigenvalues are real and exponentially small, and establish the complete semiclassical asymptotics for these eigenvalues.