A Mesoscopic Quantum Eraser

Abstract

Motivated by a recent experiment by Buks et al. [Nature 391, 871 (1998)] we consider electron transport through an Aharonov-Bohm interferometer with a quantum dot in one of its arms. The quantum dot is coupled to a quantum system with a finite number of states acting as a which-path detector. The Aharonov-Bohm interference is calculated using a two-particle scattering approach for the joint transitions in detector and quantum dot. Tracing over the detector yields dephasing and a reduction of the interference amplitude. We show that the interference can be restored by a suitable measurement on the detector and propose a mesoscopic quantum eraser based on this principle.

7 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Europhys. Lett., uses EuroPhys.sty and EuroMacro.tex (included)

References in corpus (2)

• Dephasing and the Orthogonality Catastrophe in Tunneling through a Quantum Dot: the ``Which Path?'' Interferometer
• Dephasing in a quantum dot due to coupling with a quantum point contact

Cited by in corpus (6)

• A double-slit quantum eraser
• Phase coherent transmission through interacting mesoscopic systems
• An Electromechanical Which-Path Interferometer
• An Electronic Mach-Zehnder Quantum Eraser
• Probing Quantitatively Two-electron Entanglement with a Spintronic Quantum Eraser
• An x-ray quantum eraser setup for time-energy complementarity