A particle measured in a too high potential

  • Context: Undergrad 
  • Thread starter Thread starter DarkBabylon
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Particle Potential
Join the discussion
Ask a follow-up here, or get your own question answered by working scientists, mathematicians and engineers — people, not an autocomplete.
Real named experts · corrections over time · the nuance an AI answer skips
1 reply · 1K views
DarkBabylon
Messages
72
Reaction score
10
Hello, we were introduced to qunatum physics this semester. We were tackling the problem of particles sent with a certain value of energy into a potential well as well as a barrier.

The not so very new thing to me was that the probability is non zero in places where the potential is higher. In fact it is one of the things you hear about around the internet already. What is not at all obvious is what happens in a measurement.

Suppose I would put sensors in the barrier, and send particles with lower energy than the barrier. If I were to measure the position of the particle and find it INSIDE the barrier with the energy still being lower than the barrier, what would happen to its wave function?

Likewise in a well at a bound state. If I measured its position to be outside of the well, and the energy still would be lower than the potential outside, would it still be bound?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Physics news on Phys.org
If you managed to detect inside the range of the barrier it would actually be over the barrier so to speak. It would have a higher energy, possibly by stealing energy from the measuring equipment.