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arXiv:1604.02544

Quantization of Time in Dynamic Barrier Tunnelling

Sydney G. Davison, Timothy S. Davison

Published Apr 9, 2016• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In the Büttiker-Landauer perturbation approach to electron tunnelling, through a time-modulated rectilinear potential barrier, the Tien-Gordon identity was invoked, together with its infinite energy spectrum. Here, an exact treatment is presented which is based on the temporal wave-function matching procedure, that led to a finite energy spectrum. In seeking the condition governing the time evolution of the tunnelling process, the Euler formula provided the crucial ingredient for time quantization, which discretised the continuous time in the oscillating barrier potential and energy harmonic equations. As a result, a finite system of inelastic scattering channels was created. When an electron entered the elastic channel, it was scattered, instantaneously, into finite neighbouring energy-level scattering channels, by absorption (emission) of photon energy from (to) the oscillating field, during the transit period across the dynamic barrier. The absorption and emission times of barrier traversal, T_+ and T_-, respectively, were derived for the low and high frequency regimes of the barrier oscillations. Calculations revealed that in the low (high) frequency situation T_+= T_- (T_+< T_-).

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1604.02544

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In the Büttiker-Landauer perturbation approach to electron tunnelling, through a time-modulated rectilinear potential barrier, the Tien-Gordon identity was invoked, together with its infinite energy spectrum. Here, an exact treatment is presented which is based on the temporal wave-function matching procedure, that led to a finite energy spectrum. In seeking the condition governing the time evolution of the tunnelling process, the Euler formula provided the crucial ingredient for time quantization, which discretised the continuous time in the oscillating barrier potential and energy harmonic equations. As a result, a finite system of inelastic scattering channels was created. When an electron entered the elastic channel, it was scattered, instantaneously, into finite neighbouring energy-level scattering channels, by absorption (emission) of photon energy from (to) the oscillating field, during the transit period across the dynamic barrier. The absorption and emission times of barrier traversal, T_+ and T_-, respectively, were derived for the low and high frequency regimes of the barrier oscillations. Calculations revealed that in the low (high) frequency situation T_+= T_- (T_+< T_-).
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.
Quantum tunneling is conventionally described using the stationary Schrödinger equation with an externally imposed potential barrier. In this work, we present a dynamical formulation of quantum tunneling in which the barrier is modeled as a structured medium possessing quantized internal modes that interact coherently with an incident electron. Using the Heisenberg operator formalism and a second-quantized representation of the barrier medium, we derive coupled dynamical equations governing the electron–barrier interaction. Under a continuum-mode and mean-field approximation, the collective response of the barrier modes generates an effective potential that reproduces the conventional rectangular barrier model and the standard tunneling transmission probability obtained from the Schrödinger equation. Within this framework, a tunneling traversal time is naturally defined from the dynamical evolution of the electron and is shown to depend on the barrier width, barrier height, and incident electron energy. Numerical simulations illustrating the transmission probability and tunneling-time behavior are presented. The results provide a complementary microscopic interpretation of tunneling processes in structured quantum media and may be relevant to nanoscale transport, photonic barriers, and coherent quantum devices.
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.
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The tunneling time of particle through given barrier is commonly defined in terms of "internal clocks" which effectively measure the interaction time with internal degrees of freedom of the barrier. It is known that this definition of the time scale for tunneling is not unique in the sense that it depends on the clock used to define it. For the case of resonance tunneling, a particular choice that in the limit of a high/broad square barrier yields the original result of Buttiker and Landauer (Phys. Rev. Lett. 1982, 49, 1739) is correlated to the lifetime of the resonance state. This is illustrated for analytically solvable one-dimensional double barrier models and for a realistic model of electron tunneling through a static water barrier. The latter calculation constitutes a novel application of this concept to a 3-dimensional model, and the observed structure in the energy dependence of the computed traversal time reflects the existence of transient tunneling resonances associated with instantaneous water structures. These models, characterized by the existence of shape resonances in the barrier, make it possible to examine different internal clocks that were proposed for measuring tunneling times in situations where a "clock independent" intrinsic time scale (the resonance life time) for the tunneling time exists. It is argued that this time may be used in order to estimate the relative importance of dynamical barrier processes that affect the tunneling probability.
The authors analyse tunnelling through time-modulated barriers. The numerical results for the transmitted sideband intensities, obtained with wave-packet simulations, are in quantitative agreement with the analytical results of Buttiker and Landauer (1982, 1985). For opaque barriers the asymmetry of the sideband intensities can be characterized with a single frequency whose inverse Buttiker and Landauer interpret as the traversal time. This simple behaviour does not hold in general, and the authors discuss some of the difficulties one meets in an attempt to generalise the one-parameter description to arbitrary barriers. Furthermore, they examine analytically the transmitted wavefunction in the adiabatic limit, and show that the related density and current involve both the dwell time and the Buttiker time, defined in the context of a Larmor clock. This suggests the possibility that experiments probing different aspects of the transmitted wavefunction may yield different, but complementary, information about the tunnelling process.