You Will Not Tunnel Through a Wall - Comments

[Gary Feierbach]

What is the process by which hydrogen gas H2 escapes from a metal container by going through the metal matrix? Is that a type of tunneling? There is a negative charge barrier from the metal electrons tor the electrons circling the H2 gas molecules but they are treated as a package with a negative charge.

 

[ZapperZ]

What is the process by which hydrogen gas H2 escapes from a metal container by going through the metal matrix? Is that a type of tunneling? There is a negative charge barrier from the metal electrons tor the electrons circling the H2 gas molecules but they are treated as a package with a negative charge.

Hydrogen gas is too small and can sneak through metal joints, etc. it is not tunneling.

When I do a RGA reading on an ultra-vacuum system, I usually see hydrogen gas, even when we are at low 10^-10 Torr.

Zz.

 

[Gary Feierbach]

I got an answer from the oil and gas industry. In gas pipelines there is moisture and H₂S that reacts with the iron in the metal to make FeS. The Hydrogen from the reaction in the form of ions can penetrate the metal and also accumulate in striations in the metal, combine into H2 and actually form blisters from the pressure buildup. For this reason these pipes are injected with corrosion inhibitors along with the product.

 

[Jeff Rosenbury]

You are forgetting that in the SIS tunneling example that I had given, the electrons in the Cooper pair are entangled with each other. So they make up the Josephson current.

Zz.

I'm not forgetting; I'm ignorant. Shouldn't there be a separate entanglement for tunneling on top of any entanglement for normal pair formation?

As I understand it, the probability of an unentangled pair of electrons tunneling should be the probability of one tunneling times the probability of the other tunneling? (Of course there will be conundrums such as changing potentials and the like.)

But if the particles tunnel together more frequently than the product of their individual probabilities they would be partially entangled for tunneling purposes in addition to being entangled for spin purposes.

Or is there a difference between the shifting probabilities due to changing potentials and entanglement? Perhaps just having the changing probabilities counts as some form of entanglement? (That is a semantic argument, BTW. It depends on how we define entanglement.)