  Tunneling delay times of wavepackets in quantum mechanical penetration of
rectangular barriers have long been known to show a perplexing independence
with respect to the width of the barrier. This also has relevence to the
transmission of evanescent waves in optics. Some authors have claimed that in
the presence of absorption or inelastic channels (which they model by taking a
complex barrier potential) this effect no longer exists, in that the time delay
becomes proportional to the barrier width. Taking the point of view that
complex potentials imply non-Hermitian Hamiltonians and are as such fraught
with conceptual pit-falls particularly in connection to problems involving time
evolution, we have constructed a two-channel model which does not suffer from
such maladies in order to examine this issue. We find that the conclusions
arrived at by the earlier authors need to be qualified.
