paper

Unveiling the bosonic nature of an ultrashort few-electron pulse

arXiv:1711.03509 · doi:10.1038/s41467-018-05203-7

Abstract

Quantum dynamics is very sensitive to dimensionality. While two-dimensional electronic systems form Fermi liquids, one-dimensional systems -- Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids -- are described by purely bosonic excitations, even though they are initially made of fermions. With the advent of coherent single-electron sources, the quantum dynamics of such a liquid is now accessible at the single-electron level. Here, we report on time-of-flight measurements of ultrashort few-electron charge pulses injected into a quasi one-dimensional quantum conductor. By changing the confinement potential we can tune the system from the one-dimensional Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid limit to the multi-channel Fermi liquid and show that the plasmon velocity can be varied over almost an order of magnitude. These results are in quantitative agreement with a parameter-free theory and demonstrate a powerful new probe for directly investigating real-time dynamics of fractionalisation phenomena in low-dimensional conductors.

In v2 we added 11 pages of Supplementary Information. In v3 we updated the manuscript after it was peer-reviewed and published

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