On a universal photonic tunnelling time

Abstract

We consider photonic tunnelling through evanescent regions and obtain general analytic expressions for the transit (phase) time $τ$ (in the opaque barrier limit) in order to study the recently proposed ``universality'' property according to which $τ$ is given by the reciprocal of the photon frequency. We consider different physical phenomena (corresponding to performed experiments) and show that such a property is only an approximation. In particular we find that the ``correction'' factor is a constant term for total internal reflection and quarter-wave photonic bandgap, while it is frequency-dependent in the case of undersized waveguide and distributed Bragg reflector. The comparison of our predictions with the experimental results shows quite a good agreement with observations and reveals the range of applicability of the approximated ``universality'' property.