TRAVERSAL TIME IN TUNNELING

Traversal time in tunneling has become a somewhat controversial subject, and this note presents a personal perspective on some of these discussions. There is a widely invoked linear relationship yielding dwell time as a weighted average of traversal time and reflection time. I assert that it is totally without basis. Many authors follow wave packets through barriers. The results of such calculations are hard to correlate with experiment. Stevens has provided a wave packet approach which avoids some of the problems typically faced by such analyses; nevertheless its analytical details are questioned. The significance of complex traversal times, favored by some investigators, is questioned. The relative merit of various possible "clocks" in the analysis of traversal time is discussed, but without definitive conclusions.