Multi-particle interference in an electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer

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A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

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en

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19

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Entropy, Volume 23, issue 6

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.

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Funding Information: Acknowledgments: We thank P. Portugal and B. Roussel for useful discussions. M.M. acknowledges the hospitality of Aalto University and support from Aalto Science Institute through its Visiting Fellow Programme. We acknowledge the computational resources provided by the Aalto Science-IT project. Funding Information: Funding: The research was supported by the Academy of Finland through the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Quantum Technology (project nos. 312057 and 312299) and project no. 308515. P.B. acknowledges support from the Spanish CM “Talento Program” no. 2019-T1/IND-14088. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

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Kotilahti, J, Burset, P, Moskalets, M & Flindt, C 2021, 'Multi-particle interference in an electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer', Entropy, vol. 23, no. 6, 736. https://doi.org/10.3390/e23060736