Estimation of the Büttiker-Landauer traversal time based on the visibility of transmission current

We present a proposal for the estimation of Büttiker-Landauer traversal time based on the visibility of transmission current. We analyze the tunneling phenomena with a time-dependent potential and obtain the time-dependent transmission current. We found that the visibility was directly connected to the traversal time. Furthermore, this result is valid not only for rectangular potential barrier but also for general form of potential to which the WKB approximation is applicable. We compared these results with the numerical values obtained from the simulation of Nelson’s quantum mechanics. Both of them fit together and it shows that our method is very effective in measuring experimentally the traversal time.