ABSTRACT
The study of quantum tunneling dates back to the early days of quantum mechanics, and has been a major topic of investigation in both theory and experiment. In recent years, there has been significant effort to understand tunneling phenomena for systems that exhibit chaos in their classical counterpart [13,15,18,29,42]. In particular, tunneling was predicted for mixed systems where chaotic and stable regions are intermingled [14]. The tunneling in this case is between two stable regions (referred to as nonlinear resonances, or islands of stability) in the classical phase space. The classical transport between these islands is forbidden by “dynamical barriers” in phase space. In contrast, quantum tunneling can couple the two islands so that a wave packet oscillates coherently between the two symmetry-related regions. This phenomenon is called dynamical tunneling because it occurs in phase space, without a fixed potential barrier. In the case of a mixed phase space, the presence of the chaotic region can enhance the rate of dynamical tunneling, a phenomenon known as chaos-assisted tunneling [53]. In this chapter, we review our experimental observation of chaosassisted tunneling with ultracold cesium atoms [48-51]. We first give a brief overview of some basic concepts and of earlier work in order to provide a context for our results.
