Magnetic Tunneling Between Disc-Shaped Obstacles

In this paper we derive formulae for the semiclassical tunneling in the presence of a constant magnetic field in 2 dimensions. The ‘wells’ in the problem are identical discs with Neumann boundary conditions, so we study the magnetic Neumann Laplacian in the complement of a set of discs. We provide a reduction method to an interaction matrix, which works for a general configuration of obstacles. When there are two discs, we deduce an asymptotic formula for the spectral gap. When the discs are placed along a regular lattice, we derive an effective operator which gives rise to the famous Harper’s equation. Main challenges in this problem compared to recent results on magnetic tunneling are the fact that one-well ground states have non-trivial angular momentum which depends on the semiclassical parameter, and the existence of eigenvalue crossings.