Energy-time uncertainty principle and lower bounds on sojourn time

Abstract

One manifestation of quantum resonances is a large sojourn time, or autocorrelation, for states which are initially localized. We elaborate on Lavine's time-energy uncertainty principle and give an estimate on the sojourn time. For the case of perturbed embedded eigenstates the bound is explicit and involves Fermi's Golden Rule. It is valid for a very general class of systems. We illustrate the theory by applications to resonances for time dependent systems including the AC Stark effect as well as multistate systems.