Quantum Tunneling Takes a Surprisingly Long Time

Quantum tunneling happens when a particle seemingly teleports across a barrier. But despite how instantaneous this event sounds, recent research suggests that it doesn’t happen nearly as fast as you might think.

Hosted by: Michael Aranda

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[mlq]

Imagine describing something on the scale of atoms and light rays in milliseconds WILD

[whyogodwhy]

I never thought about it but Michael Aranda and Hank Green honestly have pretty similar cadences to their talking, you can tell in the opening to the video

[Thoran]

0.61 milliseconds seem like ages compared to some other other times that have been measured.

[MasterGeekMX]

quantum tunneling is even the backbone on how SSD store data. The electrons are trapped inside a conductor surrounded by an isolator, but they get in there becasue one side of the isolator is thin enough that with enough voltage electrons can quantum tunnel into it.

[mastershooter]

particle's spin is super ez to understand dude

just imagine a ball now imagine that ball is spinning, but there's no ball and it's not spinning

ez right?

[AdityaAmitabh]

Hey, just a weird observation. Is it just me or did this guy's speech pattern just become more like Hank's?

[NZ-fotp]

As a uToronto graduate student myself, this makes me happy and proud

[jimmyzhao]

The particles have a snack and beverage whilst inside the barrier.

[Marco_Onyxheart]

As someone who regularly works with microcontrollers, 0.61 milliseconds an eternity to me. That's at almost 10000 clock cycles on a 16MHz Arduino.

[chrishdez]

3:31 spin is not rotation?!?! High School physics has betrayed me!!!

[El-RaShahzad]

Wow it must be Nevada in the tunneling

[m_sedziwoj]

collapsing of wavefunction is still unknown, so not probability of "be there" but "finding it there", because maybe it was always there, but maybe it was nowhere until function collapse.

[alexhatfield]

"Timing and tracking individual particles?" Wow, Heisenberg would turn in his grave...!

[deftheocelot]

Almost as slow as Nevada

i'm kidding, good vibes to you guys counting, must be stressful

bless u guys scishow for posting during this time

[teetahh]

i can't believe they got adam driver to host an episode of scishow

[SG-bplg]

Loving the longer hair my dude. Rock on

[kingkiller]

Next question to ask: Do factors like the specific thing doing the tunneling, the temperature of the thing, and the properties of the barrier affect the time taken and how so? Ex. Does it take longer to tunnel through a thicker barrier? Does an atom at a higher temperature take a different amount of time? If it is a Hydrogen atom instead of a Rubidium atom does it affect the time? It taking time at all is mysterious to me, should that be interpreted as meaning that the thing doing the tunneling is still in some point in space and tunneling is a type of motion? Like, just kind of forcing it's way through like punching a whole in the wall except for some reason not actually leaving a hole? I'm not sure how to make sense of this information. I'm perfectly willing to adjust my mental image and understanding given new information that contradicts my current understanding but I prefer to have one even if it is flawed, not sure how to make sense of this yet though.

[craigmooring]

Is anyone else relieved that Mr. Aranda's Covid-19 non-haircut was not covering his left eye this time?

[appleappington]

first time visiting channel in years time to go back and binge a lot of videos

[brianxx]

Severus' nephew did a great job explaining!

How wide was the barrier beam? Does varying the width of the barrier have an understandable effect on the time it takes to cross it?