An exactly soluble model of a shallow double well

Abstract Shallow one-dimensional double-well potentials appear in atomic and molecular physics and other fields. Unlike the “deep” wells of macroscopic quantum coherent systems, shallow double wells need not present low-lying two-level systems. We argue that this feature, the absence of a low-lying two-level system in certain shallow double wells, may allow the finding of new test grounds for quantum mechanics in mesoscopic systems. We illustrate the above ideas with a family of shallow double wells obtained from reflectionless potentials through the Darboux–Backlund transform.