Tunneling semiclassical

The obvious defect of classical trajectories is that they do not describe quantum effects. The best known of these effects is tunnelling tln-ough barriers, but there are others, such as effects due to quantization of the reagents and products and there are a variety of interference effects as well. To circumvent this deficiency, one can sometimes use semiclassical approximations such as WKB theory. WKB theory is specifically for motion of a particle in one dimension, but the generalizations of this theory to motion in tliree dimensions are known and will be mentioned at the end of this section. More complete descriptions of WKB theory can be found in many standard texts [1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, 18]. 

This means that there is a cross-over temperature defined by (1.7) at which tunneling switches off , because the quasiclassical trajectories that give the extremum to the integrand in (2.1) cease to exist. This change in the character of the semiclassical motion is universal for barriers of arbitrary shape. 

Equation (4.46), however, regardless of the phases i/ , does not describe periodic orbits, unless the frequencies oj are commensurate. Thus the first question that is to be answered is, how to semiclassically quantize a separate well. Furthermore, because of symmetry, a tunneling orbit should pass through the point Q = iQ +, Q-)- However, if it sets out from the turning point at... 

A calculation of tunneling splitting in formic acid dimer has been undertaken by Makri and Miller [1989] for a model two-dimensional polynomial potential with antisymmetric coupling. The semiclassical approximation exploiting a version of the sudden approximation has given A = 0.9cm" while the numerically exact result is 1.8cm" Since this comparison was the main goal pursued by this model calculation, the asymmetry caused by the crystalline environment has not been taken into account. 

When Va varied within the interval 1-8 cm the tunneling splitting was found to depend nearly linearly on Fj, in agreement with the semiclassical model of section 3.5 [see eq. (3.92)], and the prefactor AjA ranged from 0.1 to 0.3, indicating nonadiabatic tunneling. Since this model is one-dimensional, it fails to explain the difference between splittings in the states with the [Pg.127]

Two-dimensional semiclassical studies described in section 4 and applied to some concrete problems in section 6 show that, when no additional assumptions (such as moving along a certain predetermined path) are made, and when the fluctuations around the extremal path are taken into account, the two-dimensional instanton theory is as accurate as the one-dimensional one, and for the tunneling problem in most cases its answer is very close to the exact numerical solution. Once the main difficulty of going from one dimension to two is circumvented, there seems to be no serious difficulty in extending the algorithm to more dimensions that becomes necessary when the usual basis-set methods fail because of the exponentially increasing number of basis functions with the dimension. 

The STM postulated tunneling matrix element distribution P(A) oc 1 /A implies a weakly (logarithmically) time-dependent heat capacity. This was pointed out early on by Anderson et al. [8], while the first specific estimate appeared soon afterwards [93]. The heat capacity did indeed turn out time dependent however, its experimental measures are indirect, and so a detailed comparison with theory is difficult. Reviews on the subject can be found in Nittke et al. [99] and Pohl [95]. Here we discuss the A distribution dictated by the present theory, in the semiclassical limit, and evaluate the resulting time dependence of the specific heat. While this limit is adequate at long times, quantum effects are important at short times (this concerns the heat condictivity as well). The latter are discussed in Section VA. 

As the starting point in the discusion, we consider a simplified version of the diagram of a tunneling center s energy states from Fig. 14 with e < 0, as shown on the left hand side of Fig. 21. We remind the reader that the e < 0 situation, explicitly depicted in Fig. 21, implies lower transition energies than when the semiclassical energy difference e > 0 and thus dominates the low-temperature onset of the boson peak and the plateau. 

We have carrried out an analysis of the multilevel structure of the tunneling centers that goes beyond a semiclassical picture of the formation of those centers at the glass transition, which was primarily employed in this chapter. These effects exhibit themselves in a deviation of the heat capacity and conductivity from the nearly linear and quadratic laws, respectively, that are predicted by the semiclassical theory. 

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