Critique of the Wigner tunneling speed and a proposed alternative

摘要

In the context of superluminal propagation of wave packets through potential barriers, the tunneling speed is usually characterized by the Wigner velocity. We propose an alternative speed that takes into account the interference between the incoming and the reflected waves and leads to a better estimation of arrival time for a wave packet entering the tunneling region. This arrival time is derived by an extrapolation from inside the barrier. The analytical theory is based on the stationary phase approximation whose validity is justified by a comparison with the numerical solution of the time-dependent Dirac equation.