Self-consistent quantal treatment of decay rates within the perturbed static path approximation

The perturbed static path approximation (PSPA) was extended to treat the decay of damped metastable systems. In this first step, a simple schematic two body interaction was taken and the nucleonic excitations were assumed to be concentrated in one Lorentzian peak around a certain mean value. Corrections to thermal hopping that take place above the critical temperature T_O were highlighted.