Past exam of the short options paper shared by Prelims and Parts A and B of the physics course of the University of Oxford / 2018 / S3 / 3

Quantum tunnelling is transmission through a region where the particle's energy is below the classical potential energy. The stationary wavefunction decays within that region but need not vanish at its far boundary, so matching can leave a nonzero transmitted probability current.

This does not require a particle to borrow energy temporarily. Energy is conserved for a time-independent barrier; the classically forbidden region is described by an evanescent wave, with the same stationary energy as the incident and transmitted waves.

Inside a rectangular barrier with $E<V$, the stationary Schrödinger equation givesIts independent solutions are $e^{\pm \alpha x}$ withFor an opaque barrier the amplitude is suppressed by approximately $e^{-\alpha L}$ and the probability by $e^{-2\alpha L}$. Matching contributes a prefactor, so this exponential approximation is not an exact transmission coefficient for a transparent or very thin barrier. For two moving particles the relative-coordinate mass is their reduced mass.

At a separation of $1$ fm, the proton Coulomb energy is approximately $V=e^2/(4\pi {\epsilon }_{0}r)\simeq 1.44$ MeV, whereas $k_{B}T\simeq 0.862$ keV at the stated solar-core temperature. As a deliberately crude rectangular-barrier estimate, take a width of $1$ fm and use the two-proton reduced mass $\mu =m_p/2$. ThensoTreating one proton as fixed and using $m_p$ instead gives about $0.59$. Both estimates only say that this arbitrarily shortened barrier would be fairly transparent; the opaque-barrier exponential is itself uncontrolled for such a small exponent.

There is an important conditioning issue. If the protons have already reached a separation of one femtometre, most of the long-range Coulomb suppression has already been overcome. The rectangular estimate cannot represent the probability for thermal protons starting far apart. Their classical turning separation at this energy is about $1.7\times 10^3$ fm, not one femtometre.

Two major suppressions are missing from the one-femtometre rectangular estimate. First, the Coulomb barrier extends far beyond nuclear distances and is not rectangular. A semiclassical integral through it produces the Gamow factor $\exp (-2\pi \eta )$, with $\eta ={\alpha }_{\mathrm{fs}}\sqrt{\mu c^2/(2E)}$; at the illustrative thermal energy it is already of order $10^{-11}$. A thermal average additionally weights the high-energy tail and is not the same as evaluating a single thermal energy.

Second, two protons cannot simply form a stable bound diproton. The proton–proton chain starts with a weak-interaction conversion producing a deuteron, a Positron and a neutrino. The weak transition probability supplies a further very large suppression. Thus the quoted tiny fusion probability is not a pure one-dimensional barrier transmission probability with universal energy-independent meaning.

The Sun contains of order $10^{57}$ nucleons in a hot dense core and offers enormously many encounters over astronomical times. A very small reaction probability per encounter can therefore supply its luminosity while consuming only a small fraction of the fuel per unit time. The small weak reaction rate is also crucial for the long stellar lifetime; a larger core temperature increases burning and triggers expansion and cooling.