Quantum tunneling in dispersive optical bistability

Quantum tunneling times for the model of Drummond and Walls describing dispersive optical bistability are investigated for small cavity damping. Without damping the system can be described by an appropriate Hamilton operator. By expanding the density operator in eigenstates of this Hamilton operator the stationary solution as well as the lowest eigenvalues are obtained from a Pauli master equation for the diagonal elements of the density matrix for small cavity damping. The tunneling time follows from the lowest nonzero eigenvalue of this master equation. Expectation values as well as the Q function for the stationary case are also presented.