Time is never time at all

Neelima Kelkar presented a different perspective into the problem of alpha decay. This comes courtesy of the 'dwell time', which is the time a particle spends inside a barrier in the quantum tunneling problem we all came to love in our quantum mechanics classes. After some quasi-philosophical questions on the meaning of time on such microscopic situation, the talk went on with a lot of formulas and derivations that made me felt we had the famous V.Z giving the talk (my QM professor; fortunately the lecture was not followed by one of his infamous homework assignments!). The derivations converged on the identity between dwell time and the Wigner width of the state the system decays to (or is it decay from?), thus dwell time is a elegant concept nicely related to alpha decay. How, why, what else can we learn from it, that it help in other types of decays?? There was lively discussion about it in the question session. The answers won't be found on this post, but with Neelima in one of the coffee breaks

There talk also presented a journey from the literature in the field, starting in the 1930's and explaining the main results and controversies in about 50 papers most of us PASIParticipants will never read. But if you must read one: Asher Peres, Am J Phys 48 552 (1980). What is a clock? But beware the conclusions about the demise of Hamiltonian quantum mechanics; they have been proved wrong.