Photon tunneling through absorbing dielectric barriers

Abstract

Using a recently developed formalism of quantization of radiation in the presence of absorbing dielectric bodies, the problem of photon tunneling through absorbing barriers is studied. The multilayer barriers are described in terms of multistep complex permittivities in the frequency domain which satisfy the Kramers--Kronig relations. From the resulting input--output relations it is shown that losses in the layers may considerably change the photon tunneling times observed in two-photon interference experiments. It is further shown that for sufficiently large numbers of layers interference fringes are observed that cannot be related to a single traversal time.

17 pages LaTeX, 9 figures (PS) included

References in corpus (3)

• Conditional probabilities in quantum theory, and the tunneling time controversy
• Sub-femtosecond determination of transmission delay times for a dielectric mirror (photonic bandgap) as a function of angle of incidence
• Quantum Nonlocality in Two-Photon Experiments at Berkeley

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Three-dimensional quantization of the electromagnetic field in dispersive and absorbing inhomogeneous dielectrics
• QED commutation relations for inhomogeneous Kramers-Kronig dielectrics
• Quantum state transformation by dispersive and absorbing four-port devices
• Entanglement transformation at absorbing and amplifying four-port devices
• Negative superluminal velocity and violation of Kramers-Kronig relations in "causal" optical setups
• Antibunching of distorted optical wave packets at a beam splitter