Unified Derivation of Tunneling Times from Decoherence Functionals

Abstract

The four tunneling times, the Larmor time, the Büttiker-Landauer time, the Bohm-Wigner time, and the Pollak-Miller time, originally obtained from very different physical models, are derived in a unified manner from the Gell-Mann-Hartle decoherence functionals. The origin of the two types of derivatives in the expressions for these tunneling times is clarified at the level of Feynman paths.