I found this link about making your own tunnel diode quite interesting

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
13,079
Negative resistance was once a very active field of research for high speed logic and RF technology (I built a UHF spy bug from one in the 70's), but as transistors became faster the technology was mainly a backwater part used in some older TEK scopes. Today that's possibly changing as some of the new quantum effect devices have bi-stable states that involve tunneling for negative differential resistance.
 

Thread Starter

Rolland B. Heiss

Joined Feb 4, 2015
236
Negative resistance was once a very active field of research for high speed logic and RF technology (I built a UHF spy bug from one in the 70's), but as transistors became faster the technology was mainly a backwater part used in some older TEK scopes. Today that's possibly changing as some of the new quantum effect devices have bi-stable states that involve tunneling for negative differential resistance.
Interesting. You spoke of the new quantum effect devices that involve tunneling for negative differential. Are there new types of tunneling components and what do they look like? Have you any links to a photo or part number?
 

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
13,079

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
13,079
Thanks for the link. Quite a bit of the information contained therein will take me a great amount of time to attempt to understand however! o_O
Try to think of the charge not as a hard particle like a marble but as a wave function with a probability curve of where (in a small volume of space) the momentum level and direction will be. So if we have a charge with a value 0.5 and a potential barrier with a value of 1.0 with a thickness on the scale of the probability curve. Classical mechanics would say it will never cross -> that barrier even if the charge value was 0.9 of the barrier in a static condition, it would just be reflected back <- .
Quantum Tunneling across the barrier is the effect of the exponential probability of some particles (as a wave function) at a lower energy than than the barrier crossing the potential barrier by going straight across that thin barrier instead of all or nothing over it.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/quantum/barr.html
 

Thread Starter

Rolland B. Heiss

Joined Feb 4, 2015
236
Try to think of the charge not as a hard particle like a marble but as a wave function with a probability curve of where (in a small volume of space) the momentum level and direction will be. So if we have a charge with a value 0.5 and a potential barrier with a value of 1.0 with a thickness on the scale of the probability curve. Classical mechanics would say it will never cross -> that barrier even if the charge value was 0.9 of the barrier in a static condition, it would just be reflected back <- .
Quantum Tunneling across the barrier is the effect of the exponential probability of some particles (as a wave function) at a lower energy than than the barrier crossing the potential barrier by going straight across that thin barrier instead of all or nothing over it.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/quantum/barr.html
Thanks for helping me understand it all better!
 
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