Wave attenuation to clock sojourn times

Abstract

The subject of time in quantum mechanics is of perennial interest especially because there is no observable for the time taken by a particle to transmit (or reflect) from a particular region. Several methods have been proposed based on scattering phase shifts and using different quantum clocks, where the time taken is clocked by some external input or indirectly from the phase of the scattering amplitudes. In this work we give a general method for calculating conditional sojourn times based on wave attenuation. In this approach clock mechanism does not couple to the Hamiltonian of the system. For simplicity, specific case of a delta dimer is considered in detail. Our analysis re-affirms recent results based on correcting quantum clocks using optical potential methods, albeit in a much simpler way.

4 pages, 5 figures. Minor corrections made and journal reference added

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Wigner time delay and related concepts -- Application to transport in coherent conductors
• Hartman effect and non-locality in quantum networks
• Hartman effect in presence of Aharanov Bohm flux
• Survival of ${\Phi }_0/2$ periodicity in presence of incoherence in asymmetric Aharonov-Bohm rings
• A comparative study of some models of incoherence at the mesoscopic scale
• Wave attenuation model for dephasing and measurement of conditional times