No Arabic abstract
We compute the exact single-particle time-resolved dynamics of electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometers based on Landau edge-states transport, and assess the effect of the spatial localization of carriers on the interference pattern. The exact carrier dynamics is obtained by solving numerically the time-dependent Schroedinger equation with a suitable 2D potential profile reproducing the interferometer design. An external magnetic field, driving the system to the quantum Hall regime with filling factor one, is included. The injected carriers are represented by a superposition of edge states and their interference pattern reproduces the results of Y.Ji et al.[Nature 422, 415 (2003)]. By tuning the system towards different regimes, we find two additional features in the transmission spectra, both related to carrier localization, namely a damping of the Aharonov-Bohm oscillations with increasing difference in the arms length, and an increased mean transmission that we trace to the energy-dependent transmittance of quantum point contacts. Finally, we present an analytical model, also accounting for the finite spatial dispersion of the carriers, able to reproduce the above effects.
We develop a theoretical description of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer built from integer quantum Hall edge states, with an emphasis on how electron-electron interactions produce decoherence. We calculate the visibility of interference fringes and noise power, as a function of bias voltage and of temperature. Interactions are treated exactly, by using bosonization and considering edge states that are only weakly coupled via tunneling at the interferometer beam-splitters. In this weak-tunneling limit, we show that the bias-dependence of Aharonov-Bohm oscillations in source-drain conductance and noise power provides a direct measure of the one-electron correlation function for an isolated quantum Hall edge state. We find the asymptotic form of this correlation function for systems with either short-range interactions or unscreened Coulomb interactions, extracting a dephasing length $ell_{phi}$ that varies with temperature $T$ as $ell_{phi} propto T^{-3}$ in the first case and as $ell_{phi} propto T^{-1} ln^2(T)$ in the second case.
We present an original statistical method to measure the visibility of interferences in an electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer in the presence of low frequency fluctuations. The visibility presents a single side lobe structure shown to result from a gaussian phase averaging whose variance is quadratic with the bias. To reinforce our approach and validate our statistical method, the same experiment is also realized with a stable sample. It exhibits the same visibility behavior as the fluctuating one, indicating the intrinsic character of finite bias phase averaging. In both samples, the dilution of the impinging current reduces the variance of the gaussian distribution.
We report time-of-flight measurements on electrons travelling in quantum-Hall edge states. Hot-electron wave packets are emitted one per cycle into edge states formed along a depleted sample boundary. The electron arrival time is detected by driving a detector barrier with a square wave that acts as a shutter. By adding an extra path using a deflection barrier, we measure a delay in the arrival time, from which the edge-state velocity $v$ is deduced. We find that $v$ follows $1/B$ dependence, in good agreement with the $vec{E} times vec{B}$ drift. The edge potential is estimated from the energy-dependence of $v$ using a harmonic approximation.
The recent development of dynamic single-electron sources makes it possible to observe and manipulate the quantum properties of individual charge carriers in mesoscopic circuits. Here, we investigate multi-particle effects in an electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer driven by dynamic voltage pulses. To this end, we employ a Floquet scattering formalism to evaluate the interference current and the visibility in the outputs of the interferometer. An injected multi-particle state can be described by its first-order correlation function, which we decompose into a sum of elementary correlation functions that each represent a single particle. Each particle in the pulse contributes independently to the interference current, while the visibility (determined by the maximal interference current) exhibits a Fraunhofer-like diffraction pattern caused by the multi-particle interference between different particles in the pulse. For a sequence of multi-particle pulses, the visibility resembles the diffraction pattern from a grid, with the role of the grid and the spacing between the slits being played by the pulses and the time delay between them. Our findings may be observed in future experiments by injecting multi-particle pulses into an electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer.
A p-n junction, an interface between two regions of a material populated with carriers of opposite charge, is a basic building block of solid state electronic devices. From the fundamental physics perspective, it often serves as a tool to reveal the unconventional transport behavior of novel materials. In this work, we show that a p-n junction made from a three dimensional topological insulator (3DTI) in a magnetic field realizes an electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer with virtually perfect visibility. This is owed to the confinement of the topological Dirac fermion state to a closed two-dimensional surface, which offers the unprecedented possibility of utilizing external fields to design networks of chiral modes wrapping around the bulk in closed trajectories, without the need of complex constrictions or etching. Remarkably, this junction also acts as a spin filter, where the path of the particle is tied to the direction of spin propagation. It therefore constitutes a novel and highly tunable spintronic device where spin polarized input and output currents are naturally formed and could be accessed and manipulated seperately.