TUNNELING IN A SELF-CONSISTENT DYNAMIC IMAGE POTENTIAL

We have calculated the self-consistent effective potential for an electron tunneling through a square barrier while interacting with surface plasmons. This potential reduces to the classical image potential in the static limit. In the opposite limit, when the "velocity" of the tunneling electron is large, it reduces to the unperturbed square-barrier potential. For a wide variety of parameters the dynamic effects on the transmission coefficient T = (t2) can, for instance, be related to the Buttiker-Landauer traversal time for tunneling, given by tau-BL = h(d lnt/dV).