The Debroglie Relation and SR?

[Nugatory]

I am curious as to how this might be applied to quantum tunnelling. Could it be interpreted that a particle spends only imaginary time inside the barrier?

No.

 

[Jilang]

Why do you say not?

 

[stevendaryl]

Why do you say not?

Well, it's not clear what it could possibly mean to spend an imaginary amount of time doing something.

 

[secur]

See "Interpreting attoclock measurements of tunnelling times" http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v11/n6/full/nphys3340.html

From the abstract: "We show that, in the hydrogen atom, optical tunneling is instantaneous."

Professor Anatoli Kheifets explains his results: (see http://phys.org/news/2015-05-physicists-quantum-tunneling-mystery.html#jCp)

"At that timescale the time an electron takes to quantum tunnel out of an atom was thought to be significant. But the mathematics says the time during tunneling is imaginary - a complex number - which we realized meant it must be an instantaneous process"

 

[Jilang]

Well, it's not clear what it could possibly mean to spend an imaginary amount of time doing something.

Viewing it quite literally from the maths, time orthogonal to real time we experience?

 

[Nugatory]

Viewing it quite literally from the maths, time orthogonal to real time we experience?

"Time orthogonal to real time" is meaningless noise. Please do not further pursue this nonsense.