Dissipation-assisted tunneling in asymmetric double-well potentials

The motion of the center of a wave packet localized in one of the wells of an asymmetric double-well potential is studied. The asymmetric potential is obtained from a solvable symmetric potential using the Gel'fand–Levitan formalism, by keeping the energy eigenvalues unchanged, but changing the normalization of the ground-state wave function. While in a symmetric double well the wave packet tunnels back and forth between the two wells, for an asymmetric well, in general, tunneling does not take place. This is independent of the initial location of the wave packet, i.e., whether it is centered at the minimum of the shallower or of the deeper well. However, when such a system is coupled to a dissipative force, then the tunneling becomes possible. For instance it is shown that if, as a model of dissipative coupling, one chooses Gisin's nonlinear evolution equation, then the center of the wave packet ends up in the deeper well (decay of false vacuum). This result depends on the particular model of dissipation, for instance, an optical potential model yields a different result.