A recipe for the accurate calculation of eigenstates of quartic double
-well oscillators is presented. The behavior of eigenenergies as a fun
ction of the coupling strength is also studied. The quality of the sem
iclassical (WKB) expression for eigenvalues is critically assessed in
this context. The analysis also includes a discussion on the possibili
ty of degeneracy in such one-dimensional systems. (C) 1995 John Wiley
& Sons, Inc.