Traversal Time for Tunneling

Abstract

One of several contradictory existing results for the time a tunneling particle interacts with its barrier is confirmed, by considering tunneling through a time-modulated barrier. At low modulation frequencies the traversing particle sees a static barrier. At high frequencies the particle tunnels through the time-averaged potential, but can do it inelastically, losing or gaining modulation quanta. The transition between the two regimes yields $\ensuremath{\int}\mathrm{dx}{[\frac{m}{2(V\ensuremath{-}E)}]}^{\frac{1}{2}}$ for the traversal time.