CALCULATIONS FOR AN EXPERIMENT FOR DETERMINING THE DURATION OF QUANTUM TUNNELING WITH A LASER-ILLUMINATED FIELD EMITTER

Previous experiments with heterostructures and Josephson junctions suggest that quantum tunneling has a specific duration. We have used four different methods to simulate laser-illuminated field emission with the Fowler-Nordheim (one-dimensional) model for the static potential. The emitted current varies with the wavelength of the laser, having a small asymptotic increase at large wavelengths and a resonance that is centered at the wavelength for which the period of the laser equals twice the semiclassical time for barrier traversal. These results suggest that the laser-induced increase in the emitted current may be used as the basis for determining the duration of quantum tunneling. We will make pulsed measurements with lasers at several different wavelengths in order to examine these effects and to separate them from competing phenomena.