Determination of the mean tunneling flight time in the Büttiker-Landauer oscillating-barrier model as the reflected phase time

Abstract

The oscillating-barrier model was used by B\"uttiker and Landauer to determine a ``traversal time for tunneling.'' The model sets a timescale but is not the physically measured flight time of a wave packet scattered on the oscillating-barrier potential. In this paper we show that the flight time in the limit of a narrow-in-momentum wave packet is given by the reflected phase time associated with the various branches of the scattered particle. This is but another example which establishes that tunneling flight times are a reflection of the Wigner phase times. As such, the oscillating-barrier model does not add any new information about tunneling flight times which has not been elucidated previously using static barrier models.