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Quantum Tunneling Is Not Instantaneous, Physicists Show
- strogonoff 6y ago> They also verified another strange prediction of quantum mechanics: the lower the energy, or slower the movement, of a tunneling particle, the less time it spends in the barrier. This result is counterintuitive, because in our everyday notion of how the world works, a slower particle would be expected to remain in the barrier for a longer stretch of time. This seems to make intuitive sense to me, given the “peak of the wave function” explanation offered earlier in the article for why particles arrive faster if they tunnel. For a higher-energy particle, it is more determined which way (and with which velocity) it's headed, so its future is more certain (the space of possible states is narrower). IANAQP
- pontifier 6y agoI agree that it makes a strange sort of sense. A slower particle within the barrier would maybe need to get out of the forbidden region more quickly. The strangest part to me was that it spends time in the barrier at all, and is effected by it's time there. I somehow thought that in quantum tunneling the barrier was bypassed entirely, but this kind of proves that it wasn't bypassed and was actually traversed when it shouldn't have been. I am also not a quantum physicist.