A study of transit times in Dirac tunneling

Abstract

Based on the Dirac equation, the behavior of relativistic electrons which tunnel a potential barrier of height V0 for incoming energies between V0 and V0+m is studied by using the wave packet formalism. The choice of this incoming energy zone guarantees that only electrons participate to the tunneling process. In the opaque limit, as shown in a previous analysis, the transit velocity is proportional to the barrier width and for relativistic potential tends to a constant value greater than $c$. In this paper, a new numerical study shows a very surprising result: superluminal transmissions are also evident for thin barriers.

12 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Barrier Paradox in the Klein Zone
• Time as a quantum observable
• Tunneling time calculations for general finite wavepackets based on the presence time formalism
• Existence and nonexistence of an intrinsic tunneling time
• Planar Dirac diffusion
• Relative helicity phases in planar Dirac scattering

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Subluminality of relativistic quantum tunneling
• Superluminal tunneling times without superluminal signaling: Fading of the MacColl-Hartman effect at early times
• Degenerate solutions to the Dirac equation for massive particles and their applications in quantum tunneling
• Microcausality and Tunneling Times in Relativistic Quantum Field Theory