Coherence oscillations in dephasing by non-Gaussian shot noise

Abstract

A non-perturbative treatment is developed for the dephasing produced by the shot noise of a one-dimensional electron channel. It is applied to two systems: a charge qubit and the electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI), both of them interacting with an adjacent partitioned electronic channel acting as a detector. We find that the visibility (interference contrast) can display oscillations as a function of detector voltage and interaction time. This is a unique consequence of the non-Gaussian properties of the shot noise, and only occurs in the strong coupling regime, when the phase contributed by a single electron exceeds π. The resulting formula reproduces the recent surprising experimental observations reported in (I Neder et al 2006 Preprint cond-mat/0610634), and indicates a general explanation for similar visibility oscillations observed earlier in the MZI at large bias voltage. We explore in detail the full pattern of oscillations as a function of coupling strength, voltage and time, which might be observable in future experiments. © IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.