Role of $PT$-symmetry in understanding Hartman effect

Abstract

The celebrated Hartman effect, according to which, the tunneling time through a opaque barrier is independent of the width of the barrier for a sufficiently thick barrier, is not well understood theoretically and experimentally till today. In this work we attempt to through some light to understand the mystery behind this paradoxical result of tunneling .For this purpose we calculate the tunneling time from a layered non-Hermitian system to examine the effect of $PT$-symmetry over tunneling time. We explicitly find that for system respecting $PT$-symmetry, the tunneling time saturates with the thickness of the $PT$-symmetric barrier and thus shows the existence of Hartman effect. For non PT-symmetric case, the tunneling time depends upon the thickness of the barrier and Hartman effect is lost. We further consider the limiting case in which the non-Hermitian system reduces to the real barrier to show that the Hartman effect from a real barrier is due to $PT$-symmetry (of the corresponding non-Hermitian system) .