Quantum Tunnelling - History

History

Quantum tunnelling was developed from the study of radioactivity, which was discovered in 1896 by Henri Becquerel. Radioactivity was examined further by Marie and Pierre Curie, for which they earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. Ernest Rutherford and Egon Schweidler studied its nature, which was later verified empirically by Friedrich Kohlrausch. The idea of the half-life and the impossibility of predicting decay was created from their work.

Friedrich Hund was the first to take notice of tunnelling in 1927 when he was calculating the ground state of the double-well potential. Its first application was a mathematical explanation for alpha decay, which was done in 1928 by George Gamow and independently by Ronald Gurney and Edward Condon. The two researchers simultaneously solved the Schrödinger equation for a model nuclear potential and derived a relationship between the half-life of the particle and the energy of emission that depended directly on the mathematical probability of tunnelling.

After attending a seminar by Gamow, Max Born recognized the generality of tunnelling. He realized that it was not restricted to nuclear physics, but was a general result of quantum mechanics that applies to many different systems. Shortly thereafter, both groups considered the case of particles tunnelling into the nucleus. The study of semiconductors and the development of transistors and diodes led to the acceptance of electron tunnelling in solids by 1957. The work of Leo Esaki, Ivar Giaever and Brian David Josephson predicted the tunnelling of superconducting Cooper pairs, for which they received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973.