Conduction bands in classical periodic potentials

Details Conduction bands in classical periodic potentials Conduction bands in classical periodic potentials

2009-05-28

arxiv.org/abs/0905.4694v1

Physics

Mathematical Physics

11 pages, 10 figures

Scientific paper

The energy of a quantum particle cannot be determined exactly unless there is an infinite amount of time in which to perform the measurement. This paper considers the possibility that $\Delta E$, the uncertainty in the energy, may be complex. To understand the effect of a particle having a complex energy, the behavior of a classical particle in a one-dimensional periodic potential $V(x)=-\cos(x)$ is studied. On the basis of detailed numerical simulations it is shown that if the energy of such a particle is allowed to be complex, the classical motion of the particle can exhibit two qualitatively different behaviors: (i) The particle may hop from classically-allowed site to nearest-neighbor classically-allowed site in the potential, behaving as if it were a quantum particle in an energy gap and undergoing repeated tunneling processes, or (ii) the particle may behave as a quantum particle in a conduction band and drift at a constant average velocity through the potential as if it were undergoing resonant tunneling. The classical conduction bands for this potential are determined numerically with high precision.

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