Natural Tunneling Distances

An even more fundamental reason why protein structural heterogeneity is not selected to assist or retard electron tunneling arises from the 

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In this equation, the connectedness criterion [A] embraces the nature of the inter-tube junctions, as it describes the efficiency of electron tunneling between adjacent tubes. The value of A is set by the electron tunneling distance [f], the value of which presumably is influenced by the temperature and by the electronic states of the CNTs, the contact potential barrier, and the electrostatic... 

If the wavelengths of the reacting nuclei become comparable to barrier widths, that is, the distance nuclei must move to go from reactant well to product well, then there is some probability that the nuclear wave functions extend to the other side of the barrier. Thus, the quantum nature of the nuclei allows the possibility that molecules tunnel through, rather than pass over, a barrier. 

It will be seen that the reflection of the shock wave from a free face is of considerable importance in the use of explosives. In practice, the most economic use of an explosive can only be achieved if it is flred at a suitable distance from such a free face. This distance is known as the burden of the shot. If, as in tunnelling, no free face exists naturally, the first shots fired are heavily loaded and arranged so as to produce such a free face for the later charges. 

In the 70s, a new class of static long-range reaction in irradiated liquids, glasses and solids, called tunnelling recombination was discovered [47, 48]. Tunnelling recombination has a purely quantum-mechanical nature and results in the reaction between dissimilar particles separated by distances as... 

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