Metastable States When the Fermi Golden Rule Constant Vanishes

Abstract

Resonances appearing by perturbation of embedded non-degenerate eigenvalues are studied in the case when the Fermi Golden Rule constant vanishes. Under appropriate smoothness properties for the resolvent of the unperturbed Hamiltonian, it is proved that the first order Rayleigh-Schr\"odinger expansion exists. The corresponding metastable states are constructed using this truncated expansion. We show that their exponential decay law has both the decay rate and the error term of order $\varepsilon^4$, where $\varepsilon$ is the perturbation strength.