Coherence in magnetic quantum tunneling

Quantum tunneling between two potential wells in a magnetic field can be strongly increased when the potential barrier varies in the direction perpendicular to the line connecting the two wells and remains constant along this line. An oscillatory structure of the wave function is formed in the direction joining the wells. The resulting motion can be coherent like motion in a conventional narrow band periodic structure. A particle penetrates the barrier over a long distance wh...

Quantum tunneling between two potential wells in a magnetic field can be strongly increased when the potential barrier varies in the direction perpendicular to the line connecting the two wells and remains constant along this line. A periodic structure of the wave function is formed in the direction joining the wells. The resulting motion can be coherent like motion in a conventional narrow band periodic structure. A particle penetrates the barrier over a long distance which ...

We study the dynamical equilibrium correlation function of the polaron-dressed tunneling operator in the dissipative two-state system. Unlike the position operator, this coherence operator acts in the full system-plus-reservoir space. We calculate the relevant modified influence functional and present the exact formal expression for the coherence correlations in the form of a series in the number of tunneling events. For an Ohmic spectral density with the particular damping s...

Manifestations of quantum coherence in the electronic conductance through nearly closed quantum dots in the Coulomb blockade regime are addressed. We show that quantum coherent tunneling processes explain some puzzling statistical features of the conductance peak-heights observed in recent experiments at low temperatures. We employ the constant interaction model and the random matrix theory to model the quantum dot electronic interactions and its single-particle statistical f...

Quantum particles interacting with potential barriers are ubiquitous in physics, and the question of how much time they spend inside classically forbidden regions has attracted interest for many decades. Recent developments of new experimental techniques revived the issue and ignited a debate with often contradictory results. This motivates the present study of an exactly solvable model for quantum tunneling induced by a strong field. We show that the tunneling dynamics can d...

We present a theoretical analysis of several aspects of nonequilibirum cotunneling through a strong Coulomb-blockaded quantum dot (QD) subject to a finite magnetic field in the weak coupling limit. We carry this out by developing a generic quantum Heisenberg-Langevin equation approach leading to a set of Bloch dynamical equations which describe the nonequilibrium cotunneling in a convenient and compact way. These equations describe the time evolution of the spin variables of ...

Quantum mechanical objects or nanoobjects have been proposed as bits for information storage. While time-averaged properties of magnetic, quantum-mechanical particles have been extensively studied experimentally and theoretically, experimental investigations of the real time evolution of magnetization in the quantum regime were not possible until recent developments in pump-probe techniques. Here we investigate the quantum dynamics of effective spin systems by means of analyt...

This article presents a review on the theoretical and the experimental developments on macroscopic quantum tunneling and phase transition of the escape rate in spin systems. We present the basic ideas with simplified calculations so that it is readable to both specialists and nonspecialists in this area of research. A brief derivation of the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics in its original form using the orthonormal position and momentum basis is reviewed. For s...

Decoherence processes in crystals of molecular magnets are prototypical for interacting electronic spin systems. We analyze the Landau-Zener dynamics of the archetypical TbPc$_2$ complex diluted in a diamagnetic monocrystal. The dependence of the tunneling probability on the field sweep rate is evaluated in the framework of the recently proposed master equation in which the decoherence processes are described through a phenomenological Lindblad operator. Thus, we showcase low...

An extension to the quantum Langevin equation is derived, that is valid in the incoherent hopping regime, and which allows one to incorporate quantum tunneling events. This is achieved by the inclusion of additional stochastic variables in the Langevin equation representing the tunneling events. A systematic derivation of this extension and of its regime of validity is presented. The study is motivated by efforts to determine the error in reading the state of a super-conducti...