Superluminal tunneling and the Sauter-Schwinger effect
Speaker:
Randall Dumont, McMaster University
Date and Time:
Friday, April 10, 2026 - 11:00am to 12:00pm
Location:
Fields Institute, Room 309, Stewart Library
Abstract:
Recent relativistic wavepacket computations of an electron tunneling through a barrier give arrival time distributions peaked at times indicating superluminal effective velocity. Subsequent investigations showed that this effect does not provide a means of transmitting information faster than photons. More recent work includes electron-positron pair production, as the barrier required for tunneling is supercritical with respect to the Sauter-Schwinger effect.

