Potential Barriers and Quantum Tunneling - A Layman's Introduction

Note: This is a layman's introduction to quantum tunneling only. For a general introduction to quantum mechanics, please see Mauler's Layman's Guide to Quantum Mechanics

Quantum tunneling is a concept from quantum mechanics, a branch of modern physics. The concept is explained using the following anecdote.

Suppose there is a hill, a real-world hill which you might walk up, if you were so inclined (no pun intended). Also suppose that three identical balls are rolling at different speeds towards the hill*. Due to this speed difference, each ball has a different energy of motion to the others. As the balls begin to roll up the hill, they also begin to slow down. The slowest ball does not have enough energy of motion to make it up the hill. It slows and slows, and eventually stops somewhere below the top for an instant in time, before rolling back down the hill. The second ball has enough energy to make it to the top of the hill, but no more. It comes to a stop on top of the hill. The last ball has more energy of motion than it actually needs to make it to the top of the hill. So when it makes it to the top, it still has some motion energy, and it rolls over the top, and down the other side.

This is all perfectly normal behaviour for balls on hills - nothing new there. However scientists (more specifically quantum physicists) discovered earlier last century, that when the balls are very very small, something very strange happens.

In the world of the very very small, balls usually behave in the same well-known manner described in the anecdote above. However, sometimes they don't. Sometimes balls which DO have enough energy to roll right up that hill and keep going down the other side, don't make it up the hill. That's weird. Imagine taking a bowling ball, and hurling it with all your might up a gentle hill. You know it's got enough energy to go over the top, but you blink, and when you open your eyes again, the bowling ball is rolling back down the hill towards you.

What's even stranger though, is that in this world of the very very small (and it is the REAL world, inhabited by you and I), sometimes balls which DON'T have enough energy to get up the hill, still do so (and continue down the other side). So it's like your bowling ball comes back out of the return shute, and you take it and roll it ever so gently up that same hill. You know it doesn't have enough energy to make it to the top, but then you blink, and when you open your eyes, there it is, rolling down the other side.

This puzzling behaviour has actually been observed to happen, many many times, by scientists. The phenomenon has been given the name "tunneling", for it is as if the ball (or 'particle' as we call it) digs a tunnel through that hill, to get to the other side. In such quantum experiments, scientists fire very small bullets at very small walls, and sometimes those bullets which do not have enough energy to break through the wall, are observed a short time later, on the other side (where it would seem, they have no right to be!).

Regarding this strange behaviour, I stress that THIS IS A REAL PHENOMENON. It actually applies to everything in the universe, but the chance of it happening to something as large as an elephant, or even a baseball, or a marble, is very small indeed. So small in fact, that it will probably never be seen to happen by a human on this planet. The smaller a thing is, the greater the chance of quantum tunneling occuring to it. Things that you can see with the naked eye are far too big. The kinds of particles to which tunneling commonly occurs can only be seen with special microscopes**.

As a final point, please note that it is probably a good thing that quantum tunneling is almost never observed to happen to everyday objects. It would not be too much fun if that butchers' knife you just placed safely on the table, suddenly tunneled through and found its way into the top of your foot. Of course it might tunnel through your foot as well, but.....well......if you ever see that happen, please let me know.


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* In quantum physics, the hill is known as a 'potential barrier'

** The kind of microscopes necessary to see the particles to which tunneling routinely occurs, are know as Scanning Tunneling Microscopes (S.T.M.). In an ironic twist, the technology which drives the S.T.M., itself relies on the principle of quantum tunneling to operate.