Tunnelling necessitates negative Wigner function

We study the temporal aspects of quantum tunneling as manifested in time-of-arrival experiments in which the detected particle tunnels through a potential barrier. In particular, we present a general method for constructing temporal probabilities in tunneling systems that (i) defines `classical' time observables for quantum systems and (ii) applies to relativistic particles interacting through quantum fields. We show that the relevant probabilities are defined in terms of spe...

The negativity of a given state's Wigner function has been proposed as a measure of quantumness of that state in a unipartite system. This otherwise physically intuitive and useful phase-space measure however does not yield the right correspondence principle limit, and also turns out to yield infinite values for the infinite square well. We show that both these issues can be sensibly resolved using coarse-graining of the Wigner function.

This article is a slightly expanded version of the talk I delivered at the Special Plenary Session of the 46-th Annual Meeting of the Israel Physical Society (Technion, Haifa, May 11, 2000) dedicated to Misha Marinov. In the first part I briefly discuss quantum tunneling, a topic which Misha cherished and to which he was repeatedly returning through his career. My task was to show that Misha's work had been deeply woven in the fabric of today's theory. The second part is an a...

Time evolution of tunneling phenomena in medium is studied using a standard model of environment interaction. A semiclassical formula valid at low, but finite temperatures is derived in the form of integral transform for the reduced Wigner function, and the tunneling probability in thermal medium is calculated for a general tunneling potential of one dimensional system. Effect of dissipation, its time evolution in particular, depends on the behavior of the potential far beyon...

A formulation of non-relativistic quantum mechanics in terms of Newtonian particles is presented in the shape of a set of three postulates. In this new theory, quantum systems are described by ensembles of signed particles which behave as field-less classical objects which carry a negative or positive sign and interact with an external potential by means of creation and annihilation events only. This approach is shown to be a generalization of the signed particle Wigner Monte...

We study the decay of unstable states by formulating quantum tunneling as a time-of-arrival problem: we determine the detection probability for particles at a detector located a distance L from the tunneling region. For this purpose, we use a Positive-Operator-Valued-Measure (POVM) for the time-of-arrival determined in quant-ph/0509020 [JMP 7, 122106 (2006)]. This only depends on the initial state, the Hamiltonian and the location of the detector. The POVM above provides a we...

The decay rates of quasistable states in quantum field theories are usually calculated using instanton methods. Standard derivations of these methods rely in a crucial way upon deformations and analytic continuations of the physical potential, and on the saddle point approximation. While the resulting procedure can be checked against other semi-classical approaches in some one-dimensional cases, it is challenging to trace the role of the relevant physical scales, and any intu...

We discuss the propagation of wave packets through interacting environments. Such environments generally modify the dispersion relation or shape of the wave function. To study such effects in detail, we define the distribution function P_{X}(T), which describes the arrival time T of a packet at a detector located at point X. We calculate P_{X}(T) for wave packets traveling through a tunneling barrier and find that our results actually explain recent experiments. We compare ou...

This letter establishes a firm relationship between classical nonlinear resonances and the phenomenon of dynamical tunneling. It is shown that the classical phase space with its hierarchy of resonance islands completely characterizes dynamical tunneling. In particular, it is not important to invoke criteria such as the size of the islands and presence or absence of avoided crossings for a consistent description of dynamical tunneling in near-integrable systems.

In this article we introduce a quasiprobability distribution of work that is based on the Wigner function. This construction rests on the idea that the work done on an isolated system can be coherently measured by coupling the system to a quantum measurement apparatus. In this way, a quasiprobability distribution of work can be defined in terms of the Wigner function of the apparatus. This quasidistribution contains the information of the work statistics and also holds a clea...