Coulomb interaction has a striking effect on electronic propagation in one dimensional conductors. The interaction of an elementary excitation with neighboring conductors favors the emergence of collective modes which eventually leads to the destruction of the Landau quasiparticle. In this process, an injected electron tends to fractionalize into separated pulses carrying a fraction of the electron charge. Here we use two-particle interferences in the electronic analog of the Hong-Ou-Mandel experiment in a quantum Hall conductor at filling factor 2 to probe the fate of a single electron emitted in the outer edge channel and interacting with the inner one. By studying both channels, we analyze the propagation of the single electron and the generation of interaction induced collective excitations in the inner channel. These complementary information reveal the fractionalization process in time domain and establish its relevance for the destruction of the quasiparticle which degrades into the collective modes.
We consider an electronic analog of the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interferometer, where two single electrons travel along opposite chiral edge states and collide at a Quantum Point Contact. Studying the current noise, we show that because of interactions between co-propagating edge states, the degree of indistinguishability between the two electron wavepackets is dramatically reduced, leading to reduced contrast for the HOM signal. This decoherence phenomenon strongly depends on the energy resolution of the packets. Insofar as interactions cause charge fractionalization, we show that charge and neu…
We consider an electronic Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer in the integer quantum Hall regime, where the colliding electronic states are generated by applying voltage pulses (creating for instance Levitons) to ohmic contacts. The aim of this work is to investigate possible mechanisms leading to a reduced visibility of the Pauli dip, i.e., the noise suppression expected for synchronized sources. It is known that electron-electron interactions cannot account for this effect and always lead to a full suppression of the Hong-Ou-Mandel noise. Focusing on the case of filling factor $ν=2$, we show inste…
We investigate heat current fluctuations induced by a periodic train of Lorentzian-shaped pulses, carrying an integer number of electronic charges, in a Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer implemented in a quantum Hall bar in the Laughlin sequence. We demonstrate that the noise in this collisional experiment cannot be reproduced in a setup with a single drive, in contrast to what is observed in the charge noise case. Nevertheless, the simultaneous collision of two identical levitons always leads to a total suppression even for the Hong-Ou-Mandel heat noise at all filling factors, despite the presenc…
We review and develop recent results regarding Leviton excitations generated in topological states of matter - such as integer and fractional quantum Hall edge channels - and carrying a charge multiple of the electronic one. The peculiar features associated to these clean and robust emerging excitations can be detected through current correlation measurements. In particular, relevant information can be extracted from the noise signal in generalized Hong-Ou-Mandel experiments, where Levitons with different charges collide against each other at a quantum point contact. We describe this quantity …
We consider the effect of dephasing on a quantum dot which injects single electrons on a chiral edge channel of the quantum Hall effect. Dephasing is described by the coupling of the dot to a bosonic bath which represents the electromagnetic environment. Using the input-output formalism of quantum optics, we derive the density matrix of the edge degrees of freedom. Results are illustrated by computing the zero frequency current-current correlations when two such single electron emitters achieve a collision at the location of a quantum point contact, in the same spirit as the Hong Ou Mandel exp…
We propose a two-dimensional Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) type interference experiment for Weyl fermions in graphene and 3D topological insulators. Since Weyl fermions exhibit linear dispersion, similar to photons in vacuum, they can be used to obtain the HOM interference intensity pattern as a function of the delay time between two Weyl fermions. We show that while the Coulomb interaction leads to a significant change in the angle dependence of the tunneling of two identical Weyl fermions incident from opposite sides of a potential barrier, it does not affect the HOM interference pattern, in contrast…
The edge states of a two-dimensional topological insulator are characterized by their helicity, a very remarkable property which is related to the time-reversal symmetry and the topology of the underlying system. We theoretically investigate a Hong-Ou-Mandel like setup as a tool to probe it. Collisions of two electrons with the same spin show a Pauli dip, analogous to the one obtained in the integer quantum Hall case. Moreover, the collisions between electrons of opposite spin also lead to a dip, known as $\mathbb{Z}_{2}$ dip, which is a direct consequence of the constraints imposed by time-re…
We show that multi-mode entanglement of electrons in a mesoscopic conductor can be detected by a measurement of the zero-frequency current correlations in an electronic Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer. By this mean, one can further establish a lower bound to the entanglement of formation of two-electron input states. Our results extend the work of Burkard and Loss [Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 087903 (2003)] to many channels and provide a way to test the existence of entangled states involving both orbital and spin degrees of freedom.
We consider the electronic analog of the quantum optics Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer, in a realistic condensed matter device based on single electron emission in chiral edge states. For electron-electron collisions, we show that the measurement of the zero-frequency current correlations at the output of a quantum point contact produces a dip giving precious information on the electronic wavepackets and coherence. As a feature truly unique to Fermi statistics and condensed matter, we show that two-particle interferences between electron and hole in the Fermi sea can produce a positive peak in …
Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometry allows one to detect the presence of entanglement in two-photon input states. The same result holds for two-particles input states which obey to Fermionic statistics. In the latter case however anti-bouncing introduces qualitative differences in the interferometer response. This effect is analyzed in a Gedankenexperiment where the particles entering the interferometer are assumed to belong to a one-parameter family of quons which continuously interpolate between the Bosonic and Fermionic statistics.
We consider a device which allows to create and probe single Majorana fermions, in the form of Bogoliubov quasiparticles. It is composed of two counter-propagating edge channels, each put in proximity with a superconducting region where Andreev reflection operates, and which thus converts electrons into Bogoliubov quasiparticles. The edge channels then meet at a quantum point contact where collisions can be achieved. A voltage biased version of the setup was studied in Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 070604 (2014) and showed non-local interference phenomena and signatures of Bogoliubov quasiparticle col…
We report direct evidence of the bosonic nature of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) in a scattering-based beamsplitter. A parametric down-conversion source is used to produce two indistinguishable photons, each of which is converted into a SPP on a metal-stripe waveguide and then made to interact through a semi-transparent Bragg mirror. In this plasmonic analog of the Hong-Ou-Mandel experiment, we measure a coincidence dip with a visibility of 72%, a key signature that SPPs are bosons and that quantum interference is clearly involved.
The electronic Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer in the integer quantum Hall regime is an ideal system to probe the building up of quantum correlations between charge carriers and it has been proposed as a viable platform for quantum computing gates. Using a parallel implementation of the split-step Fourier method, we simulated the antibunching of two interacting fermionic wave packets impinging on a quantum point contact. Numerical results of the exact approach are compared with a simplified theoretical model based on one-dimensional scattering formalism. We show that, for a realistic geometry, t…
The interplay between single-particle interference and quantum indistinguishability leads to signature correlations in many-body scattering. We uncover these with a semiclassical calculation of the transmission probabilities through mesoscopic cavities for systems of non-interacting particles. For chaotic cavities we provide the universal form of the first two moments of the transmission probabilities over ensembles of random unitary matrices, including weak localization and dephasing effects. If the incoming many-body state consists of two macroscopically occupied wavepackets, their time dela…
We probe the indistinguishability of photons emitted by a semiconductor quantum dot (QD) via time- and temperature- dependent two-photon interference (TPI) experiments. An increase in temporal-separation between consecutive photon emission events, reveals a decrease in TPI visibility on a nanosecond timescale, theoretically described by a non-Markovian noise process in agreement with fluctuating charge-traps in the QD's vicinity. Phonon-induced pure dephasing results in a decrease in TPI visibility from $(96\pm4)\,$\% at 10\,K to a vanishing visibility at 40\,K. In contrast to Michelson-type m…
Two-photon quantum interference at a beam splitter, commonly known as Hong-Ou-Mandel interference, was recently demonstrated with \emph{microwave-frequency} photons by Lang \emph{et al.}\,\cite{lang:microwaveHOM}. This experiment employed circuit QED systems as sources of microwave photons, and was based on the measurement of second-order cross-correlation and auto-correlation functions of the microwave fields at the outputs of the beam splitter. Here we present the calculation of these correlation functions for the cases of inputs corresponding to: (i) trains of \emph{pulsed} Gaussian or Lore…
Scalable quantum photonic technologies require low-loss integration of many identical single-photon sources with photonic circuitry on a chip. Relatively complex quantum photonic circuits have already been demonstrated; however, sources used so far relied on parametric-down-conversion. Hence, the efficiency and scalability are intrinsically limited by the probabilistic nature of the sources. Quantum emitter-based single-photon sources are free of this limitation, but frequency matching of multiple emitters within a single circuit remains a challenge. In this work, we demonstrate a key componen…
