Classical nonlinearity and quantum decay: The effect of classical phase-space structures - art. no. 056215

We investigate the decay process from a time dependent potential well in th e semiclassical regime. The classical dynamics is chaotic and the decay rat e shows an irregular behavior as a function of the system parameters. By st udying the weak-chaos regime we are able to connect the decay irregularitie s to the presence of nonlinear resonances in the classical phase space. A q uantitative analytical prediction that accounts for the numerical results i s obtained.