Tunneling and Energy Splitting in Ising Models

The energy splitting $E_{0a}$ in two and four dimensional Ising models is measured in a cylindrical geometry on finite lattices. By comparing to exact results in the two dimensional Ising model we demonstrate that $E_{0a}$ can be extracted very reliably from Monte Carlo calculations in practice. In four dimensions we compare the measured $E_{0a}$ with two different theoretical predictions on the finite size behavior of the energy splitting. We find that our numerical data are in favor of the predictions based on the semiclassical dilute instanton gas approximation.