2022-11-14 15:00 Online
Polychronic tunneling
Dr. Yutaro Shoji
I first overview my works and prospects and then explain a new possible quantum tunneling, polychronic tunneling. Quantum tunneling in many body system is a more non-trivial process than those discussed by Banks, Bender and Wu, and Callan and Coleman. One example is the dynamic tunneling, which has been discussed from 1970’s. Assume there are two bounded particles and only one of them feels a potential barrier.
If we try to calculate the tunneling rate of these particles through the barrier, there appears an issue; during the tunneling of one particle, the other particle also moves in real time. There exist several ways to treat this type of tunneling, but there is no method that can treat it non-perturbatively and is derived from first principles. In addition, quantum field theory (at the leading order) cannot handle this problem either since it assumes that the whole space evolves with Lorentzian time or Euclidean time. We obtained a more general path-integral formula from first principles and applied it to quantum field theory. Now, there is no need to turn whole the space into Euclidean; we can minimally turn a region into Euclidean and consider tunneling of that region letting the other regions evolve with Lorentzian time. We found that such a tunneling has a much higher tunneling rate than the standard one of Coleman’s.