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Instantons In Quantum Mechanics And Resurgent Expansions, Ulrich D. Jentschura, Jean Zinn-Justin

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

Certain quantum mechanical potentials give rise to a vanishing perturbation series for at least one energy level (which as we here assume is the ground state), but the true ground-state energy is positive. We show here that in a typical case, the eigenvalue may be expressed in terms of a generalized perturbative expansion (resurgent expansion). Modified Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization conditions lead to generalized perturbative expansions which may be expressed in terms of nonanalytic factors of the form exp(-a/g), where a>0 is the instanton action, and power series in the coupling g, as well as logarithmic factors. The ground-state energy, for …