Sharp spectral gap for degenerated Witten Laplacian

Abstract: We consider the Witten Laplacian associated to a non-Morse potential. We prove Eyring-Kramers formulas for the bottom of the spectrum of this operator in the semiclassical regime and quantify the spectral gap between these eigenvalues and the rest of the spectrum. The main ingredient is the construction of sharp degenerated Gaussian quasimodes through an adaptation of the WKB method.