Wave attenuation to clock sojourn times

The subject of time in quantum mechanics is of perennial interest especially because there is no observable for the time taken by a particle to transmit (or reflect) from a particular region. Several methods have been proposed based on scattering phase shifts and using different quantum clocks, where the time taken is clocked by some external input or indirectly from the phase of the scattering amplitudes. In this work we give a general method for calculating conditional sojourn times based on wave attenuation. In this approach clock mechanism does not couple to the Hamiltonian of the system. For simplicity, specific case of a delta dimer is considered in detail. Our analysis re-affirms recent results based on correcting quantum clocks using optical potential methods, albeit in a much simpler way. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.