DYNAMICAL EFFECTIVE POTENTIALS IN ELECTRON-TUNNELING - PATH-INTEGRAL STUDY

Dynamical effective potential felt by an electron tunneling in the pla nar metal-insulator-metal system is considered. The tunneling electron coupled to the surface-plasmon modes is described within Feynman's pa th-integral formalism. Self-consistent numerical results for the effec tive potentials, tunneling times, and tunneling rates are presented. T he classical image potential is obtained in the limit of long tunnelin g times. It is shown that in cases when the traversal time T becomes c omparable to the plasmon, i.e., screening time omega(s)(-1), considera ble departure from the classical image potential appears.