First passage time of laser-driven tunneling.

ABSTRACT

The notion of the first passage time is shown to offer a meaningful extension to quantum tunneling, providing a closed-integral-form analytical unification of the tunneling rate and the tunneling passage time. We demonstrate that, in suitable potential settings, the quantum first passage time, found as a solution to the Fokker-Planck and backward Kolmogorov's equations for the quantum probability density, recovers the hallmark results for the Kramers escape rate, the lifetime of tunneling quasi-stationary wave packets, leads to a classical, distance-over-speed passage time for a free-particle wave function, and offers useful insights into Keldysh's intimation on the electron barrier-traversal time in field-induced ionization.