Markus Glück, A. R. Kolovsky, Hans Jürgen Korsch

• The paper studies metastable states of a Bloch electron in the presence of external ac and dc fields. Provided resonance condition between period of the driving frequency and the Bloch period, the complex quasienergies are numerically calculated for two qualitatively different regimes (quasiregular and chaotic) of the system dynamics. For the chaotic regime an effect of quantum stabilization, which suppresses the classical decay mechanism, is found. This effect is demonstrated to be a kind of quantum interference phenomenon sensitive to the resonance condition.