813 research outputs found
Interacting electrodynamics of short coherent conductors in quantum circuits
When combining lumped mesoscopic electronic components to form a circuit,
quantum fluctuations of electrical quantities lead to a non-linear
electromagnetic interaction between the components that is not generally
understood. The Landauer-B\"uttiker formalism that is frequently used to
describe non-interacting coherent mesoscopic components is not directly suited
to describe such circuits since it assumes perfect voltage bias, i.e. the
absence of fluctuations. Here, we show that for short coherent conductors of
arbitrary transmission, the Landauer-B\"uttiker formalism can be extended to
take into account quantum voltage fluctuations similarly to what is done for
tunnel junctions. The electrodynamics of the whole circuit is then formally
worked out disregarding the non-Gaussianity of fluctuations. This reveals how
the aforementioned non-linear interaction operates in short coherent
conductors: voltage fluctuations induce a reduction of conductance through the
phenomenon of dynamical Coulomb blockade but they also modify their internal
density of states leading to an additional electrostatic modification of the
transmission. Using this approach we can account quantitatively for conductance
measurements performed on Quantum Point Contacts in series with impedances of
the order of . Our work should enable a better engineering of
quantum circuits with targeted properties
Dynamical Coulomb Blockade of Shot Noise
We observe the suppression of the finite frequency shot-noise produced by a
voltage biased tunnel junction due to its interaction with a single
electromagnetic mode of high impedance. The tunnel junction is embedded in a
quarter wavelength resonator containing a dense SQUID array providing it with a
characteristic impedance in the kOhms range and a resonant frequency tunable in
the 4-6 GHz range. Such high impedance gives rise to a sizeable Coulomb
blockade on the tunnel junction (roughly 30% reduction in the differential
conductance) and allows an efficient measurement of the spectral density of the
current fluctuations at the resonator frequency. The observed blockade of
shot-noise is found in agreement with an extension of the dynamical Coulomb
blockade theory
Robust quantum coherence above the Fermi sea
In this paper we present an experiment where we measured the quantum
coherence of a quasiparticle injected at a well-defined energy above the Fermi
sea into the edge states of the integer quantum Hall regime. Electrons are
introduced in an electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer after passing through a
quantum dot that plays the role of an energy filter. Measurements show that
above a threshold injection energy, the visibility of the quantum interferences
is almost independent of the energy. This is true even for high energies, up to
130~eV, well above the thermal energy of the measured sample. This result
is in strong contradiction with our theoretical predictions, which instead
predict a continuous decrease of the interference visibility with increasing
energy. This experiment raises serious questions concerning the understanding
of excitations in the integer quantum Hall regime
Finite bias visibility of the electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer
We present an original statistical method to measure the visibility of
interferences in an electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer in the presence of
low frequency fluctuations. The visibility presents a single side lobe
structure shown to result from a gaussian phase averaging whose variance is
quadratic with the bias. To reinforce our approach and validate our statistical
method, the same experiment is also realized with a stable sample. It exhibits
the same visibility behavior as the fluctuating one, indicating the intrinsic
character of finite bias phase averaging. In both samples, the dilution of the
impinging current reduces the variance of the gaussian distribution.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure
Frequency shifts of photoassociative spectra of ultracold metastable Helium atoms : a new measurement of the s-wave scattering length
We observe light-induced frequency shifts in one-color photoassociative
spectra of magnetically trapped He atoms in the metastable
state. A pair of ultracold spin-polarized helium atoms is excited into
a molecular bound state in the purely long range potential connected to
the asymptote. The shift arises from the optical coupling of
the molecular excited bound state with the scattering states and the bound
states of two colliding atoms. We measure the frequency-shifts for
several ro-vibrational levels in the potential and find a linear
dependence on the photoassociation laser intensity. Comparison with a
theoretical analysis provides a good indication for the s-wave scattering
length of the quintet () potential, nm, which
is significantly lower than most previous results obtained by non-spectroscopic
methods.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure
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