Photon tunneling through absorbing dielectric barriers

Abstract

Using a recently developed formalism of quantization of radiation in the presence of absorbing dielectric bodies, the problem of photon tunneling through absorbing barriers is studied. The multilayer barriers are described in terms of multistep complex permittivities in the frequency domain which satisfy the Kramers--Kronig relations. From the resulting input--output relations it is shown that losses in the layers may considerably change the photon tunneling times observed in two-photon interference experiments. It is further shown that for sufficiently large numbers of layers interference fringes are observed that cannot be related to a single traversal time.