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The tunneling splitting of the energy levels of a ferromagnetic particle in the presence of an applied magnetic field - previously derived only for the ground state with the path integral method - is obtained in a simple way from Schr"odinger theory. The origin of the factors entering the result is clearly understood, in particular the effect of the asymmetry of the barriers of the potential. The method should appeal particularly to experimentalists searching for evidence of macroscopic spin tunneling.
A pure Yang-Mills theory extended by addition of a quartic term is considered in order to study the transition from the quantum tunneling regime to that of classical, i.e. thermal, behaviour. The periodic field confiurations are found, which interpolate between the vacuum and sphaleron field configurations. It is shown by explicit calculation that only smooth second order transitions occur for all permissible values of the parameter A introduced with the quartic term. The theory is one of the rare cases which canbe handled analytically.
Abstract: The periodic bounce configurations responsible for quantum tunneling are obtained explicitly and are extended to the finite energy case for minisuperspace models of the Universe. As a common feature of the tunneling models at finite energy considered here we observe that the period of the bounce increases with energy monotonically. The periodic bounces do not have bifurcations and make no contribution to the nucleation rate except the one with zero energy. The sharp first order phase transition from quantum tunneling to thermal activation is verified with the general criterions.