English

Tunnelling times, Larmor clock,and the elephant in the room

Quantum Physics 2021-02-08 v1

Abstract

A controversy surrounding the "tunnelling time problem" stems from the seeming inability of quantum mechanics to provide, in the usual way, a definition of the duration a particle is supposed to spend in a given region of space. For this reason the problem is often approached from an "operational" angle. Typically, one tries to mimic, in a quantum case, an experiment which yields the desired result for a classical particle. One such approach is based on the use of a Larmor clock. We show that the difficulty with applying a non-perturbing Larmor clock in order to "time" a classically forbidden transition arises from the quantum Uncertainty Principle. We also demonstrate that for this reason a Larmor time (in fact, none of the Larmor times) cannot be interpreted as a physical time interval. We also provide a theoretical description of the quantities measured by the clock.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2102.03333,
  title  = {Tunnelling times, Larmor clock,and the elephant in the room},
  author = {D. Sokolovski and E. Akhmatskaya},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.03333},
  year   = {2021}
}