Superluminal tunneling of microwaves in smoothly varying transmission lines

Abstract

Tunneling of microwaves through a smooth barrier in a transmission line is considered. In contrast to standard wave barriers, we study the case where the dielectric permittivity is positive, and the barrier is caused by the inhomogeneous dielectric profile. It is found that reflectionless, superluminal tunneling can take place for waves with a finite spectral width. The consequences of these findings are discussed, and an experimental setup testing our predictions is proposed.

arXiv comment10 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Unified time analysis of photon and (nonrelativistic) particle Tunnelling, and the Superluminal group-velocity problem
• Concave and Convex photonic Barriers in Gradient Optics
• Polarization - dependent tunneling of light in gradient optics
• Delay times and detector times for optical pulses traversing plasmas and negative refractive media
• Time for pulse traversal through slabs of dispersive and negative ($\epsilon$, $\mu$) materials