Think again

In an effort to prove or disprove any of my recent hypotheses, I began to think up experiments that could be performed for such a purpose. In my last Mison Space entry, "Barriers, shmarriers", I argued that particles, instead of actually tunneling into and through classically forbidden regions, they enter into Mison Space and go around said region by releasing energy.

One misconception that I had, which S.R.D. Rosa cleared up in his paper, "Student Understanding of Tunneling in Quantum Mechanics", is that particles lose energy during the tunneling process. In tunneling problems, the classically forbidden region is usually represented by a barrier whose height represents is energy, leading to the misconception that the particle wave amplitude is a measurement of its energy. What the amplitude actually represents, however, is the probability that the particle will be found at that particular location.

So, contrary to my previous argument, particles do not release energy as a means of entering Mison Space. On the otherhand, within the classically forbidden region the amplitude of the particle's wave function decreases exponetially, which means that the probability of it being found diminishes exceedingly fast the farther in one looks for it. The rapidly decaying wave function could still be evidence for the particle's escapade around the barrier.

To prove this, one would simply need to put a detector within the forbidden region to see if the particle can be found there. I found an article entitled "Detection of particles under a potential barrier". It is a theoretical paper in which the authors propose a 1- and 3-D model detector for finding particles within potential barriers. The detector is able to locate a particle without significantly disturbing its wave function (to do so, the time of encounter is left unknown). By stringing several together in a simulation, they were able to encounter particles at various locations within the barrier and found that their trajectories are straight line paths.

That may debunk my side-stepping hypothesis, but then again, the simulation is based on the creator's pre-conceptions of how particles behave as they enter into the forbidden region. At any rate, in trying to reconcile this finding with previous hypotheses, I have begun to consider space in a different light, but that will have to wait for a future post.

References

1. Rosa, S.R.D. Student Understanding of Quantum Mechanics. Proceedings of the Technical Session, 22 (2006) 47-52. Institute of Physics, Sri Lanka
2. Vilenkin, A. and Winitzki, S. Detection of particles under a potential barrier. Phys. Rev. D. 30, 8 (1994)