  Tunneling is one of the most bizarre phenomena in quantum mechanics. An
attempt to understand it led to the next natural question of how long does a
particle need to tunnel a barrier. The latter gave rise to several definitions
such as the phase, dwell, Larmor and traversal times among others. A short
review of the evolution of these time concepts, followed by an account of
experiments involving field-induced tunnel ionization and electron tunneling in
a solid state junction is presented here. Whereas the former experiments use
sophisticated techniques involving femtosecond laser pulses and determine the
tunneling time by mapping the angle of rotation of the field vector to time,
like the hands of a watch, the latter provides a simpler method through the
measurement of current-voltage characteristics of the junction.
