Chaotic enhancement of decay. The effect of classical phase space structure

Abstract

We investigate the decay process from a time dependent potential well in the semiclassical regime. The classical dynamics is chaotic and the decay rate shows an irregular behavior as a function of the system parameters. By studying the weak-chaos regime we are able to connect the decay irregularities to the presence of nonlinear resonances in the classical phase space. A quantitative analytical prediction which accounts for the numerical results is obtained.

11 pages, 8 figures, uses psfig.sty (better quality figures are available at ftp://telemann.iet.unipi.it/pub/tunnel/)