Abstract
The development of dynamic single-electron sources has made 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 a series of 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 (given 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 a Mach–Zehnder interferometer.
Highlights
Quantum-coherent circuits based on mesoscopic conductors [1] combined with dynamic single-electron emitters [2,3] have paved the way for experiments on high-frequency quantum transport [4,5,6,7,8,9] and are holding great promises for future quantum technologies.Advances in nanotechnology have made it possible to fabricate highly pure samples and cool them to sub-Kelvin temperatures, where the phase coherence of the charge carriers is preserved over large enough distances to exploit and control their quantum behavior
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: In Section 2, we review the theoretical description of quantum transport in periodically driven mesoscopic conductors based on the Floquet scattering formalism, and we introduce the notion of correlation functions in electron quantum optics
We have theoretically investigated multi-particle interference in an electronic Mach–Zehnder interferometer driven by dynamic voltage pulses
Summary
Quantum-coherent circuits based on mesoscopic conductors [1] combined with dynamic single-electron emitters [2,3] have paved the way for experiments on high-frequency quantum transport [4,5,6,7,8,9] and are holding great promises for future quantum technologies. We focus in particular on the injection of clean multi-particle pulses into the interferometer, and we show how the visibility measured in the outputs can be related to the excess correlation function of the incoming pulse, which can be further decomposed into elementary contributions from the individual charges making up the pulse Based on this understanding, we can interpret an observed Fraunhofer-like diffraction pattern as arising due to the interference of the excess correlation functions of various elementary single-electron components of the multi-particle pulse.
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