Measuring Which-Path Information with Coupled Electronic Mach-Zehnder Interferometers

TL;DR

This paper presents a theoretical framework for measuring which-path information in electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometers using Coulomb coupling, revealing wave-particle complementarity and quantum erasure effects.

Contribution

It introduces a method employing contextual values for precise which-path measurements in coupled electronic MZIs, providing new physical insights and analyzing quantum erasure and weak values.

Findings

Maximal wave-like behavior in the detector optimizes which-path measurement.

Quantum erasure degree relates to measurement ambiguity.

Conditioned averages can become anomalously large due to quantum interference.

Abstract

We theoretically investigate a generalized "which-path" measurement on an electronic Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI) implemented via Coulomb coupling to a second electronic MZI acting as a detector. The use of contextual values, or generalized eigenvalues, enables the precise construction of which-path operator averages that are valid for any measurement strength from the available drain currents. The form of the contextual values provides direct physical insight about the measurement being performed, providing information about the correlation strength between system and detector, the measurement inefficiency, and the proper background removal. We find that the detector interferometer must display maximal wave-like behavior to optimally measure the particle-like which-path information in the system interferometer, demonstrating wave-particle complementarity between the system and detector. We also find that the degree of quantum erasure that can be achieved by conditioning on a specific detector drain is directly related to the ambiguity of the measurement. Finally, conditioning the which-path averages on a particular system drain using the zero frequency cross-correlations produces conditioned averages that can become anomalously large due to quantum interference; the weak coupling limit of these conditioned averages can produce both weak values and detector-dependent semi-weak values.