Electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer as a tool to probe fractional statistics

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how an electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer can be used to probe the fractional statistics of quasiparticles in the quantum Hall regime by analyzing flux-dependent tunneling currents.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical framework linking tunneling current behavior in the interferometer to the quasiparticle statistics, enabling experimental probing of fractional statistics.

Findings

Flux-dependent current is sensitive to quasiparticle statistics.

The current components follow a power law with an exponent related to statistics.

The model predicts measurable differences in current based on quasiparticle type.

Abstract

We study transport through an electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer recently devised at the Weizmann Institute. We show that this device can be used to probe statistics of quasiparticles in the fractional quantum Hall regime. We calculate the tunneling current through the interferometer as the function of the Aharonov-Bohm flux, temperature and voltage bias, and demonstrate that its flux-dependent component is strongly sensitive to the statistics of tunneling quasiparticles. More specifically, the flux-dependent and flux-independent contributions to the current are related by a power law, the exponent being a function of the quasiparticle statistics.