QUANTUM INTERFERENCE AND DETERMINATION OF THE TRAVERSAL TIME

The tunneling-time problem is shown to be analogous to the interpretat ion of the two-slit interference experiment. A measurement assuming an arbitrarily small interaction between a particle and a clock is shown to contradict the uncertainty principle and leads to complex times. A real non-negative traversal time is obtained in a measurement which s elects Feynman paths that spend in the barrier a known amount of time; this, however, strongly perturbs the tunneling. The Larmor clock demo nstrates both types of behavior.