Bargmann Zeros as a Diagnostic of the Tunneling Transition in Double-Well Quantum Systems

Abstract

Complex zeros of wavefunctions represented as entire functions in Bargmann--Fock space encode structural information about the underlying quantum state. Prior work employed zero galleries of randomly generated polynomial superpositions of Fock states as visual fingerprints suitable for classification. Here we examine whether Bargmann zeros of physically realized eigenstates of one-dimensional anharmonic and double-well Hamiltonians carry a recognizable signature of the tunneling transition in the symmetric double well. Ground and first-excited eigenstates are obtained from a variational ansatz consisting of a physically motivated symbolic envelope multiplied by a small flexible correction network, trained by Rayleigh--Ritz minimization of the finite-difference Hamiltonian expectation value and validated to reproduce energies to within $\sim 10^{-5}\,\mathrm{Ha}$. The resulting wavefunctions are projected onto the harmonic-oscillator basis and the complex zeros of the truncated Bargmann polynomial are located by numerical root-finding. For harmonic and quartic-anharmonic potentials the zeros show no preferred orientation. For double-well eigenstates, by contrast, the zeros condense onto the imaginary axis. A sweep of the barrier parameter $a$ from $0.5$ to $2.3$ reveals a continuous migration of zeros toward the imaginary axis, concurrent with the exponential collapse of the tunneling splitting $\Delta(a) = E_1 - E_0$ over $3.5$ decades. This condensation is traced to a sign-alternation pattern in the Fock-coefficient spectrum that is characteristic of bimodally localized wavefunctions. The complex zero set of the Bargmann-represented wavefunction thereby provides a compact, purely analytic diagnostic for the tunneling regime of one-dimensional double-well Hamiltonians, extending the random-polynomial zero-image framework to physical eigenstates.