Tunnelling transit time for a frustrated total internal reflection (FTIR) in a double–prism experiment was measured using microwave radiation. We have found that the transit time is of the same order of magnitude as the corresponding transit time measured either in an undersized wave-guide (evanescent modes) or in a photonic lattice. Moreover we have established that in all such experiments the...

Quantum tunnelling is a phenomenon which becomes relevant at the nanoscale and below. It is a paradox from the classical point of view as it enables elementary particles and atoms to permeate an energetic barrier without the need for sufficient energy to overcome it. Tunnelling might seem to be an exotic process only important for special physical effects and applications such as the Tunnel Dio...

The tunnelling of quasiparticles across Josephson junctions in superconducting quantum circuits is an intrinsic decoherence mechanism for qubit degrees of freedom. Understanding the limits imposed by quasiparticle tunnelling on qubit relaxation and dephasing is of theoretical and experimental interest, particularly as improved understanding of extrinsic mechanisms has allowed crossing the 100 m...

The presence of speckle in ultrasound images makes it hard to segment them using active contours. Speckle causes the energy function of the active contours to have many local minima, and the gradient descent procedure used for evolving the contour gets trapped in these minima. A new algorithm, called tunnelling descent, is proposed in this paper for evolving active contours. Tunnelling descent ...

In NMR the polarisation of the Zeeman system may be routinely probed and manipulated by applying resonant rf pulses. As with spin-1⁄2 nuclei, at low temperature the quantum tunnelling states of a methyl rotor are characterised by two energy levels and it is interesting to consider how these tunnelling states might be probed and manipulated in an analogous way to nuclear spins in NMR. In this pa...

The tunnelling current in scanning tunnelling spectroscopy (STS) is typically and often implicitly modelled by a continuous and homogeneous charge flow. If the charging energy of a single-charge quantum sufficiently exceeds the thermal energy, however, the granularity of the current becomes non-negligible. In this quantum limit, the capacitance of the tunnel junction mediates an interaction of ...

We report the observation of a thermally activated resonant tunnelling feature in the current– voltage characteristics (I(V)) of triple barrier resonant tunnelling structures (TBRTS) due to the alignment of the n = 1 confined states of the two quantum wells within the active region. With great renewed interest in tunnelling structures for high frequency (THz) operation, the understanding of dev...

We investigate the nonlinearity-assisted quantum tunnelling and formation of nonlinear collective excitations in a matter-wave interferometer, which is realized by the adiabatic transformation of a double-well potential into a singlewell harmonic trap. In contrast to the linear quantum tunnelling induced by the crossing (or avoided crossing) of neighbouring energy levels, the quantum tunnelling...

The filling fraction 1/k double layered quantum Hall state has been shown to exhibit many superfluid properties including the appearance of an alternating tunnelling current in response to an external voltage V. Here we propose the notion of “sideways tunnelling”, in which a current tunnels between two such 1/k states through an incompressible fractional quantum Hall state of filling fraction 2...

Scanning tunnelling microscopy observations resolve the structure and dynamics of metallic glass Cu100-xHfx films and demonstrate scanning tunnelling microscopy control of aging at a metallic glass surface. Surface clusters exhibit heterogeneous hopping dynamics. Low Hf concentration films feature an aged surface of larger, slower clusters. Argon ion-sputtering destroys the aged configuration, ...