Testing the reliability of a velocity definition in dispersive medium

Abstract: We introduce a method to test if a given velocity definition corresponds to an actual physical flow, when the pulse propagation in dispersive medium is considered. i) We calculate the mean arrival time between two positions in space, using the Fourier expansion in real-\omega space. ii) We calculate the mean spatial displacement between two points in time, using the Fourier expansion in real-k space. We compare the velocities calculated in the two approaches. If the velocity definition truly corresponds to an actual flow, the two velocities must be the same. However, we show that the two velocities differ significantly (4%) in the region of superluminal propagation even for the successful definition introduced by Peatross et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 84, 2370 (2000)].