Measurement of superluminal optical tunneling times in double-barrier photonic band gaps

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2002 Apr;65(4 Pt 2B):046610. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.65.046610. Epub 2002 Apr 2.

Abstract

Tunneling of optical pulses at 1.5 microm wavelength through double-barrier periodic fiber Bragg gratings is experimentally investigated in this paper. Tunneling time measurements as a function of the barrier distance show that, far from resonances of the structure, the transit time is paradoxically short--implying superluminal propagation--and almost independent of the barrier distance. This result is in agreement with theoretical predictions based on phase-time analysis and provides, in the optical context, an experimental evidence of the analogous phenomenon in quantum mechanics of nonresonant superluminal tunneling of particles across two successive potential barriers.