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kalery
- 19
- 0
I'm still in Intro Physics, and I'm a little perplexed by the concept of tunneling. An alpha particle escapes the nucleus by overcoming a potential energy barrier created by Coulombic repulsion with the protons of the nucleus, but this is a spontaneous process and does not require E input, according to my textbook. Energy conservation is violated to allow the alpha particle to move through this E barrier for a brief time interval because unk(E)unk(t) >= hbar. What's going on here... I mean, is this really what happens... How can energy conservation be violated? I thought that despite all the quantum phenomena violating classical Newtonian physics, that energy conservation still is supposed to remain constant?