Path-Integral Resolution of the Tunneling-Time Controversy
Henrique Coelho Barbosa
The time a quantum particle spends traversing a classically forbidden region has resisted un-ambiguous definition since the earliest analyses of wave-packet tunneling, and the proliferation ofmutually incompatible “clocks”—the Wigner phase time, the Büttiker–Landauer traversal time, theLarmor time, and the path-integral complex time among them—has kept the question open fordecades. The controversy has been sharpened, not settled, by the advent of attosecond angular-streaking metrology, in which competing analyses of tunnel ionization continue to disagree over theexistence of a finite delay. Here we show that these rival definitions are not alternative answersto a single question but distinct cumulants of one traversal-time quasi-distribution, generated bythe exact rectangular-barrier transmission amplitude when the latter is promoted to a cumulantgenerating functional through a barrier-height counting field. The first cumulant unifies the Wignerphase time and the Larmor/Büttiker–Landauer time as the real and imaginary parts of a singlecomplex traversal time, recovering the celebrated Hartman saturation as the width-independentvalue ℏ/V0 of its real part. The second cumulant—which, to our knowledge, has not previouslybeen enlisted as a tunneling-time observable—yields a traversal-time variance that entirely evadesthe Hartman saturation and instead grows linearly with the barrier width d. The standard devia-tion of the tunneling time therefore scales as στ ∝ √d: rather than becoming superluminally sharpfor thick barriers, the tunneling time grows progressively more uncertain, in direct opposition tothe naive superluminal reading of the Hartman effect. This parameter-free scaling, independentof the O(1) coefficient that fixes its magnitude, constitutes a falsifiable prediction: attosecond an-gular streaking, which resolves the full arrival-time distribution of tunneled electrons rather thanmerely its centroid, should register a temporal spread broadening as √d even where the mean delaysaturates. We thereby recast a nearly century-old semantic dispute as a concrete experimentalquestion.
•Jul 7, 2026•0 citations