On the Salecker-Wigner-Peres clock and double barrier tunneling

TL;DR

This paper applies the Salecker-Wigner-Peres clock formalism to measure tunneling times of wavepackets in double barrier potentials, revealing that dwell time increases with barrier spacing when the particle is likely found between barriers.

Contribution

It demonstrates the direct application of the Salecker-Wigner-Peres clock to tunneling phenomena and explores the behavior of dwell time in double barrier systems.

Findings

Dwell time increases with barrier spacing when the particle's presence between barriers is significant.

The formalism provides a way to measure tunneling time directly.

The approach deepens understanding of the generalized Hartmann effect.

Abstract

In this work we revisit the Salecker-Wigner-Peres clock formalism and show that it can be directly applied to the phenomenon of tunneling. Then we apply this formalism to the determination of the tunneling time of a non relativistic wavepacket, sharply concentrated around a tunneling energy, incident on a symmetric double barrier potential. In order to deepen the discussion about the generalized Hartmann effect, we consider the case in which the clock runs only when the particle can be found inside the region \emph{between} the barriers and show that, whenever the probability to find the particle in this region is non negligible, the corresponding time (which in this case turns out to be a dwell time) increases with the barrier spacing.