Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Physik
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A formula suitable for a quantitative evaluation of the tunneling effect in a ferromagnetic particle is derived with the help of the instanton method. The tunneling between n-th degenerate states of neighboring wells is dominated by a periodic pseudoparticle configuration. The low-lying level-splitting previously obtained with the LSZ method in field theory in which the tunneling is viewed as the transition of n bosons induced by the usual(vacuum) instanton is recovered.The observation made with our new result is that the tunneling effect increases at excited states. The results should be useful in analyzing results of experimental tests of macroscopic quantum coherence in ferromagnetic particles.
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.