The quantum mechanical tunnelling time problem-revisited

A long-standing argument in elementary quantum mechanics concerns the prescription which specifies how long it takes for a particle to tunnel through a classically forbidden region. In this paper, the controversy is reviewed by analysing a selection of principal contenders and comparing with the authors' own analytic expressions and numerical simulations. Their overall conclusion is that the phase-time result originally obtained by Wigner (1955) and Hartman (1962) is the best expression to use for a wide parameter range of barriers, energies and wavepackets.

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