We study electron spin decoherence in a two-electron double quantum dot due to the hyperfine interaction, under spin-echo conditions as studied in recent experiments. We develop a semi-classical model for the interaction between the electron and nucl
ear spins, in which the time-dependent Overhauser fields induced by the nuclear spins are treated as classical vector variables. Comparison of the model with experimentally-obtained echo signals allows us to quantify the contributions of various processes such as coherent Larmor precession and spin diffusion to the nuclear spin evolution.
We investigate theoretically the behavior of the current oscillations in an electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) as a function of its source bias. Recently, The MZI interference visibility showed an unexplained lobe pattern behavior with a pe
culiar phase rigidity. Moreover, the effect did not depend on the MZI paths difference. We argue that these effects may be a new many-body manifestation of particle-wave duality of quantum mechanics. When biasing the interferometer sources beyond the linear response regime, quantum shot-noise (a particle phenomena) must affect the interference pattern of the electrons that creates it, as a result from a simple invariance argument. An approximate solution of the interacting Hamiltonian indeed shows that the interference visibility has a lobe pattern with applied bias with a period proportional to the average path length and independent of the paths difference, together with a phase rigidity.
Very much like the ubiquitous quantum interference of a single particle with itself, quantum interference of two independent, but indistinguishable, particles is also possible. This interference is a direct result of quantum exchange statistics, howe
ver, it is observed only in the joint probability to find the particles in two separated detectors. Here we report the first observation of such interference fringes between two independent and non-interacting electrons in an interferometer proposed by Yurke et al. and Samuelsson et al. Our experiment resembles the Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) experiment, which was performed with classical waves. In the experiment, two independent and mutually incoherent electron beams were each partitioned into two trajectories. The combined four trajectories enclosed an Aharonov-Bohm (AB) flux (but not the two trajectories of a single electron). While individual currents were found to be independent of the AB flux, as expected, the cross-correlation between current fluctuations in two opposite points across the device exhibited strong AB oscillations. This is a direct signature of orbital entanglement between two electrons even though they never interact with each other.
