Purely magnetic tunneling between radial magnetic wells

Abstract

This article is devoted to the semiclassical spectral analysis of the magnetic Laplacian in two dimensions. Assuming that the magnetic field is positive and has two symmetric radial wells, we establish an accurate tunneling formula, that is a one-term estimate of the spectral gap between the lowest two eigenvalues. This gap is exponentially small when the semiclassical parameter goes to zero, but positive.