EnergyScale Mismatch of Quantum Tunneling

The conventional quantum tunneling hypothesis posits that massive real electron particles are driven by external electric fields to traverse insulating barriers in floating gate flash memories, tunnel diodes and other devices, achieving charge migration and state rewriting. Instead of fully restating macroscopic device phenomena, this paper conducts an independent physical analysis from four perspectives: intrinsic electron rest energy, actual operating energy levels of devices, the law of mass energy conservation, the erase mechanism relying on reverse electric fields, and the electric field activated characteristics of temporary stepping stone sites inside insulating dielectrics. Comparison reveals a huge energy scale gap between electron rest energy and the energy supplied by device level electric fields. If real electrons repeatedly move in and out of memory cells, one necessarily derives the prediction of periodic mass variation for storage units, which has not yet been verified by published experiments. Insulating barrier dielectrics exhibit semiconductor like threshold behaviour: once the critical voltage is reached, part of the bound electrons inside the medium are electrically activated into temporary electronic stepping stones to form relay coupling pathways for energy packets; these stepping stones deactivate immediately once the applied voltage is removed. Data erasure by reverse electric fields is realized by re activating reverse oriented temporary stepping stone pathways for bidirectional transmission of energy packets. Throughout the whole process, only energy transfers inwards and outwards; no real electron particles spatially migrate across the barrier. This paper does not reproduce the full deduction of the unified model presented in a companion preprint[9]. It focuses on inherent contradictions on energy grounds, points out unavoidable physical difficulties in the “real electron barrier crossing” picture, and demonstrates that the energy packet coupling mechanism possesses higher self consistency in energy level matching, reversible bidirectional transmission and mass conservation constraints. Testable theoretical predictions for future discriminative experiments are also provided.