Complex-valued traversal time for optical pulse transmission in a Fabry-Perot cavity

The question of how much time a wave packet spends in a traversing region of space has been of both fundamental and practical interest associated with the old problem of quantum particle tunneling. The question was then renewed by the experiment of Steinberg et al. (1993), implying the superluminal tunneling of a photon and began extending to physical systems concerning optical and electromagnetic waves. In this study, the traversal time taken by an optical pulse to off-resonantly transmit in a Fabry-Perot cavity is theoretically investigated as one such extension.