Issue |
Europhys. Lett.
Volume 60, Number 4, November 2002
|
|
---|---|---|
Page(s) | 491 - 497 | |
Section | General | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/epl/i2002-00665-7 | |
Published online | 01 November 2002 |
Correcting the quantum clock: Conditional sojourn times
Raman Research Institute -
C.V. Raman Avenue, Bangalore 560 080, India
Corresponding author: nkumar@rri.res.in
Received:
27
May
2002
Accepted:
3
September
2002
Can the quantum-mechanical sojourn time be clocked without the
clock affecting the sojourn time? Here we re-examine the
previously proposed non-unitary clock, involving
absorption/amplification by an added infinitesimal imaginary
potential , and find it not to preserve, in
general, the positivity of the sojourn time, conditional on
eventual reflection or transmission. The sojourn time is found to
be affected by the scattering concomitant with the mismatch,
however small, due to the very clock potential
introduced for the purpose, as also by any prompt scattering
involving partial waves that have not traversed the region of
interest. We propose a formal procedure whereby the sojourn time
so clocked can be corrected for these spurious scattering effects.
The resulting conditional sojourn times are then
positive-definite for an arbitrary potential, and have the proper
high- and low-energy limits. We note that such a correction also
applies to the Larmor clock and identical results are obtained by
applying our procedure in that case as well.
PACS: 03.65.Xp – Tunneling, traversal time, quantum Zeno dynamics / 73.23.-b – Electronic transport in mesoscopic systems
© EDP Sciences, 2002
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