Determination of the path taken by a quantum particle leads to a suppression of interference and to a classical behavior. We employ here a quantum which path detector to perform accurate path determination in a two-path-electron-interferometer; leading to full suppression of the interference. Following the dephasing process we recover the interference by measuring the cross-correlation between the interferometer and detector currents. Under our measurement conditions every interfering electron is dephased by approximately a single electron in the detector - leading to mutual entanglement of approximately single pairs of electrons.
Hydrodynamics is a general description for the flow of a fluid, and is expected to hold even for fundamental particles such as electrons when inter-particle interactions dominate. While various aspects of electron hydrodynamics were revealed in recent experiments, the fundamental spatial structure of hydrodynamic electrons, the Poiseuille flow profile, has remained elusive. In this work, we provide the first real-space imaging of Poiseuille flow of an electronic fluid, as well as visualization of its evolution from ballistic flow. Utilizing a scanning nanotube single electron transistor, we image the Hall voltage of electronic flow through channels of high-mobility graphene. We find that the profile of the Hall field across the channel is a key physical quantity for distinguishing ballistic from hydrodynamic flow. We image the transition from flat, ballistic field profiles at low temperature into parabolic field profiles at elevated temperatures, which is the hallmark of Poiseuille flow. The curvature of the imaged profiles is qualitatively reproduced by Boltzmann calculations, which allow us to create a phase diagram that characterizes the electron flow regimes. Our results provide long-sought, direct confirmation of Poiseuille flow in the solid state, and enable a new approach for exploring the rich physics of interacting electrons in real space.
Electronic coherence is of utmost importance for the access and control of quantum-mechanical solid-state properties. Using a purely electronic observable, the photocurrent, we measure an electronic coherence time of 22 +/- 4 fs in graphene. The photocurrent is ideally suited to measure electronic coherence as it is a direct result of quantum path interference, controlled by the delay between two ultrashort two-color laser pulses. The maximum delay for which interference between the population amplitude injected by the first pulse interferes with that generated by the second pulse determines the electronic coherence time. In particular, numerical simulations reveal that the experimental data yield a lower boundary on the electronic coherence time and that coherent dephasing masks a lower coherence time. We expect that our results will significantly advance the understanding of coherent quantum-control in solid-state systems ranging from excitation with weak fields to strongly driven systems.
Using strong-disorder renormalization group, numerical exact diagonalization, and quantum Monte Carlo methods, we revisit the random antiferromagnetic XXZ spin-1/2 chain focusing on the long-length and ground-state behavior of the average time-independent spin-spin correlation function C(l)=upsilon l^{-eta}. In addition to the well-known universal (disorder-independent) power-law exponent eta=2, we find interesting universal features displayed by the prefactor upsilon=upsilon_o/3, if l is odd, and upsilon=upsilon_e/3, otherwise. Although upsilon_o and upsilon_e are nonuniversal (disorder dependent) and distinct in magnitude, the combination upsilon_o + upsilon_e = -1/4 is universal if C is computed along the symmetric (longitudinal) axis. The origin of the nonuniversalities of the prefactors is discussed in the renormalization-group framework where a solvable toy model is considered. Moreover, we relate the average correlation function with the average entanglement entropy, whose amplitude has been recently shown to be universal. The nonuniversalities of the prefactors are shown to contribute only to surface terms of the entropy. Finally, we discuss the experimental relevance of our results by computing the structure factor whose scaling properties, interestingly, depend on the correlation prefactors.
A weakly bound electron in a semiconductor quantum wire is shown to become entangled with an itinerant electron via the coulomb interaction. The degree of entanglement and its variation with energy of the injected electron, may be tuned by choice of spin and initial momentum. Full entanglement is achieved close to energies where there are spin-dependent resonances. Possible realisations of related device structures are discussed.
We investigate the entanglement spectra arising from sharp real-space partitions of the system for quantum Hall states. These partitions differ from the previously utilized orbital and particle partitions and reveal complementary aspects of the physics of these topologically ordered systems. We show, by constructing one to one maps to the particle partition entanglement spectra, that the counting of the real-space entanglement spectra levels for different particle number sectors versus their angular momentum along the spatial partition boundary is equal to the counting of states for the system with a number of (unpinned) bulk quasiholes excitations corresponding to the same particle and flux numbers. This proves that, for an ideal model state described by a conformal field theory, the real-space entanglement spectra level counting is bounded by the counting of the conformal field theory edge modes. This bound is known to be saturated in the thermodynamic limit (and at finite sizes for certain states). Numerically analyzing several ideal model states, we find that the real-space entanglement spectra indeed display the edge modes dispersion relations expected from their corresponding conformal field theories. We also numerically find that the real-space entanglement spectra of Coulomb interaction ground states exhibit a series of branches, which we relate to the model state and (above an entanglement gap) to its quasiparticle-quasihole excitations. We also numerically compute the entanglement entropy for the nu=1 integer quantum Hall state with real-space partitions and compare against the analytic prediction. We find that the entanglement entropy indeed scales linearly with the boundary length for large enough systems, but that the attainable system sizes are still too small to provide a reliable extraction of the sub-leading topological entanglement entropy term.