Dwell times for transmission and reflection

Abstract

As was shown in quant-ph/0405028, the state of a tunneling particle can be uniquely presented as a coherent superposition of two states to describe alternative sub-processes, transmission and reflection. In this paper, on the basis of the stationary wave functions for these sub-processes, we give new definitions of the dwell times for transmission and reflection. In the case of rectangular potential barriers the dwell times are obtained explicitly. In contrast with the well-known B\"{u}ttiker's dwell-time, our dwell time for transmission increases exponentially, for the under-barrier tunneling, with increasing the barrier's width. By our approach the well-known Hartman effect is rather an artifact resulted from an improper interpretation of the wave-packet tunneling and experimental data, but not a real physical effect accompanying the tunneling phenomenon.