2007/03/31 by J. T. Chalker, Yuval Gefen, Martin Y. Veillette +1 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Semiconductor Quantum Structures and Devices #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.76.085320
published as Phys. Rev. B 76, 085320 (2007) · 12 pages, 8 figure. Published version
openalex publication_date 2007/08/13 · arxiv created 2009/01/22 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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 \ensuremathℓ_\ensuremathφ that varies with temperature T as \ensuremathℓ_\ensuremathφ\ensuremath∝T^\ensuremath-3 in the first case and as \ensuremathℓ_\ensuremathφ\ensuremath∝T^\ensuremath-1ln2(T) in the second case.