Noise induced tunneling suppression of a metastable quantum system driven by an oscillating field: a numerical experiment

Abstract

A numerical experiment on the tunneling dynamics of a metastable quantum system placed in an oscillating field and simultaneously sybjected to a small amount of noise is reported. We demonstrate that for a fixed strength of the driving field both tunneling probability and rate show a resonance-like dependence on noise frequency. For a given field strength, the injection of a small amount of noise is shown to suppress the tunneling probability and rate of tunneling. It may be considered as an example of noise-induced stabilization of an inherently unstable system. The qualitative features of the effect appear to be independent of how noise couples to the system (e.g. linear or quadratic), i.e. the details of the shape of the potential.