Although it would not get you past a brick wall and onto Platform 9¾ to catch the Hogwarts Express, quantum tunneling—in which a particle “tunnels” through a seemingly insurmountable barrier—remains a confounding, intuition-defying phenomenon. Now Toronto-based experimental physicists using rubidium atoms to study this effect have measured, for the first time, just how long these atoms spend in transit through a barrier. Their findings appeared in Nature on July 22.
The researchers have showed that quantum tunneling is not instantaneous—at least, in one way of thinking about the phenomenon—despite recent headlines that have suggested otherwise. “This is a beautiful experiment,” says Igor Litvinyuk of Griffith University in Australia, who works on quantum tunneling but was not part of this demonstration. “Just to do it is a heroic effort.”
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