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10 videos · 3 h 29 min
Explainer · YouTube
Up and Atom
A friendly ten-minute tour that builds tunnelling from light: an evanescent wave leaks a short way past a surface that totally reflects light, and an electron's wavefunction fades into a barrier in the same way, leaving a small chance of finding it on the far side. As you watch, ask what would happen to that chance if the barrier were twice as thick.
Lecture · YouTube
Physics Explained
A forty-minute deep dive that starts from the alpha-decay paradox Rutherford faced, matches the wavefunction and its slope at the barrier edges to reach an explicit tunnelling probability, then approximates the real Coulomb barrier to estimate half-lives. Watch it after Parts 2 and 3, with our transmission formulas and the worksheet's Gamow challenge beside you.
Explainer · YouTube
Sixty Symbols
Physicists from the University of Nottingham unpack the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded for macroscopic quantum tunnelling and energy quantisation in a superconducting circuit. Watch it after Part 6 to see how an entire circuit can tunnel.
Explainer · YouTube
Professor Dave Explains
The full barrier calculation behind section 2's formula, worked step by step: reflection and transmission coefficients (from 2:54), the transmission factor T (5:33), hyperbolic sines and cosines (10:29) and an application (18:48). Once 2κL is large, the exact result shrinks to the lesson's T ≈ 16(E/V)(1 − E/V)e^(−2κL); plug in E = 1 eV, V = 2 eV and L = 0.5 nm and check that you get about 2.4%.
Explainer · YouTube
FloatHeadPhysics
A story-driven tour of section 3's puzzle, with chapters running from "The alpha decay paradox" (2:30) through how quantum mechanics solves it (9:44) with tunnelling (11:36), where half-lives come from (12:50) and why not every heavy isotope alpha-decays (14:43), then a look ahead to section 4 ("The sun is too cold to be alive", 19:12). Keep the Geiger–Nuttall numbers beside you: a factor of two in alpha energy, a factor of about 5×10²³ in lifetime.
Explainer · YouTube
The Science Asylum
Takes the Sun's 15-million-degree core, hot enough to turn gas into plasma, and explains why thermodynamics alone is still not enough for fusion. Check the argument against section 4's numbers: a typical proton carries about 2 keV against a barrier of roughly 1 MeV, and most fusing pairs tunnel near the Gamow peak at about 6 keV.
Explainer · YouTube
PBS Space Time
Space Time takes on the long-running argument over whether a tunnelling particle can beat light, the question section 7 settles. Check its conclusions against the lesson's: the transmitted peak can arrive early, but the front, the first moment anything can be detected, never outruns light, and the atoms in the 2020 Toronto experiment spent about 0.6 ms inside the barrier.
Lecture · Stanford
David Miller Quantum Mechanics Courses · David A. B. Miller
Stanford's David Miller shows why ψ and dψ/dz must both be continuous, then sends a wave at an infinitely thick barrier: inside, ψ falls off as e^(−κz) instead of stopping dead, and the barrier still reflects 100% but with a phase shift that has no classical analogue. His worked example is section 1's own: an electron of 1 eV meeting a 2 eV barrier, giving an amplitude decay length 1/κ of about 0.2 nm and a probability decay length of about 0.1 nm.
Lecture · Stanford
David Miller Quantum Mechanics Courses · David A. B. Miller
Miller slices a smoothly varying barrier into thin layers whose internal boundary matrices become the identity, leaving an amplitude factor exp(−∫κ(z)dz), with κ = √(2m(V(z) − E))/ħ, and a tunnelling probability, his "penetration factor", of an edge-dependent prefactor times exp(−2∫κ(z)dz). That is section 2's WKB rule (twice the area under κ in the exponent) and the engine of Gamow's calculation in section 3; it builds on his transfer-matrix lecture (33c), so treat it as a stretch goal.
Interview · Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize · Heinrich Rohrer
Heinrich Rohrer, who built the scanning tunnelling microscope with Gerd Binnig at IBM Zurich, interviewed by Adam Smith at the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm in April 2008. It starts here on the microscope itself and its first surprises (2:25); later chapters cover the partnership with Binnig (18:15), the opposition they met (22:05), the prize (24:45) and the nanoscience revolution that followed (26:05).