Determination of elastic tunneling traversal times

The time required for an electron wave packet to tunnel through a thin potential barrier has been determined. To our knowledge, this is the first such calculation using the I-V characteristics of a double quantum well resonant tunneling structure. A lower limit is also placed on the resonant tunneling traversal time through the entire multibarrier region. For the AlAs/GaAs structure described in the text, the above times are 190 and 460 fs respectively.