It is widely believed that the WKB approximation to quantum barrier penetration is described in the path-integral formalism by a saddle-point approximation based on an expansion about an imaginary-time semiclassical path. This article examines the relationship between tunneling amplitudes and imaginary-time paths. It is shown, using a simple example, that for some tunneling amplitudes the dominant semiclassical path cannot be chosen to have purely imaginary time if all other variables are chosen to be real.
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CITATION STYLE
Burgess, C. P. (1991). Quantum tunneling and imaginary-time paths. American Journal of Physics, 59(11), 994–998. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.16659