English

Quantum pump driven fermionic Mach-Zehnder interferometer

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2009-11-11 v1

Abstract

We have investigated the characteristics of the currents in a pump-driven fermionic Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The system is implemented in a conductor in the quantum Hall regime, with the two interferometer arms enclosing an Aharonov-Bohm flux Φ\Phi. Two quantum point contacts with transparency modulated periodically in time drive the current and act as beam-splitters. The current has a flux dependent part I(Φ)I^{(\Phi)} as well as a flux independent part I(0)I^{(0)}. Both current parts show oscillations as a function of frequency on the two scales determined by the lengths of the interferometer arms. In the non-adiabatic, high frequency regime I(Φ)I^{(\Phi)} oscillates with a constant amplitude while the amplitude of the oscillations of I(0)I^{(0)} increases linearly with frequency. The flux independent part I(0)I^{(0)} is insensitive to temperature while the flux dependent part I(Φ)I^{(\Phi)} is exponentially suppressed with increasing temperature. We also find that for low amplitude, adiabatic pumping rectification effects are absent for semitransparent beam-splitters. Inelastic dephasing is introduced by coupling one of the interferometer arms to a voltage probe. For a long charge relaxation time of the voltage probe, giving a constant probe potential, I(Φ)I^{(\Phi)} and the part of I(0)I^{(0)} flowing in the arm connected to the probe are suppressed with increased coupling to the probe. For a short relaxation time, with the potential of the probe adjusting instantaneously to give zero time dependent current at the probe, only I(Φ)I^{(\Phi)} is suppressed by the coupling to the probe.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0611580,
  title  = {Quantum pump driven fermionic Mach-Zehnder interferometer},
  author = {S. -W. V. Chung and M. Moskalets and P. Samuelsson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0611580},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

10 pages, 4 figures