Decoherence and single electron charging in an electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer

Abstract

We investigate the temperature and voltage dependence of the quantum interference in an electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer using edge channels in the integer quantum-Hall regime. The amplitude of the interference fringes is significantly smaller than expected from theory; nevertheless the functional dependence of the visibility on temperature and bias voltage agrees very well with theoretical predictions. Superimposed on the Aharonov-Bohm (AB) oscillations, a conductance oscillation with a six times smaller period is observed. The latter depends only on gate voltage and not on the AB phase, and may be related to single electron charging.