Quantum hysteresis and resonant tunneling in bistable systems Original Research Article

The decay rates of damped bistable quantum systems show at low temperatures multi-resonant behavior as a function of an external bias. These resonances are connected with steps in the response of the double well system to strong external forcing and to steps in the hysteresis loop when the strong forcing is periodic. Both of these phenomena have been observed in different experiments. We provide a unified theoretical scheme and a streamlined computational analysis for their explanation.