Breakdown of correlated tunnelling
Monday, October 25, 2010 - 09:10
in Physics & Chemistry
Quantum systems do often behave differently from what we would expect intuitively and from our daily experience. One example is provided by the so-called Landau-Zener problem. It describes e.g. the tunnelling of a quantum particle between two potential wells with an initial difference in potential energy that is gradually reversed over time. The Russian physicist Lew Landau and the American physicist Clarence Zener have tackled this problem in a more general context in 1932. They found that the quantum particle would be transported from one well to the other, provided that the reversal in potential energy is carried out slow enough...