CHAOS-ASSISTED TUNNELING

We discuss and give evidence for the existence of a new mechanism for quantum dynamical tunneling. It may occur when a quantum system's underlying classical dynamics are far from integrability. In these circumstances, we show that the dominant tunneling contributions arise through chaos-assisted processes. This leads to behavior that is drastically different from that found in integrable and quasi-integrable systems. In particular, one can observe a marked crossing mechanism when a chaotic level passes nearby the tunneling ones, and the distributions of splitting (due to tunneling) can be modeled using properly designed ensembles of random matrices. Such tunneling should be amenable to experimental detection.