Marco Antonio Garcia @ on
How could i see Tunneling without spending alot of money?
Ok, so say I wanted to see quantum tunneling in an actual experiment but I don’t have the money for things like scanners and receivers in order to do this, how could I conduct an experiment that would show this to me and prove it to my class by showing them?
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Kerem Yunus Camsari @ on
I guess there’s no ‘homemade’ way of ‘seeing’ quantum mechanical tunneling. In fact this depends on your definition of ‘seeing’ tunneling. For a quick observation though you could do the following : Borrow a Zener diode from your electronics lab – and apply a voltage that is greater than the reverse breakdown voltage of the diode.
Typically, this voltage will be a lot less than what is required to induce Avalanche breakdown (due to impact ionization of valence band electrons). The relevant transport mechanism in this case is band-to-band tunneling (or Zener tunneling after Clarence Zener) which in fact is an example of quantum mechanical tunneling.
You could even check the specifications of your Zener diode, the type of materials that are used, their ionization energies, avalanche breakdown voltages etc… to prove that the energy you are applying to trigger the observed high levels of current cannot be enough to ionize the electrons – therefore the transport is indeed via quantum mechanical tunneling.
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