  We study quantum-mechanical tunneling in mixed dynamical systems between
symmetry-related phase space tori separated by a chaotic layer. Considering
e.g. the annular billiard we decompose tunneling-related energy splittings and
shifts into sums over paths in phase space. We show that tunneling transport is
dominated by chaos-assisted paths that tunnel into and out of the chaotic layer
via the ``beach'' regions sandwiched between the regular islands and the
chaotic sea. Level splittings are shown to fluctuate on two scales as functions
of energy or an external parameter: they display a dense sequence of peaks due
to resonances with states supported by the chaotic sea, overlaid on top of slow
modulations arising from resonances with states supported by the ``beaches''.
We obtain analytic expressions which enable us to assess the relative
importance of tunneling amplitudes into the chaotic sea vs. its internal
transport properties. Finally, we average over the statistics of the chaotic
region, and derive the asymptotic tail of the splitting distribution function
under rather general assumptions concerning the fluctuation properties of
chaotic states.
