Finite bias visibility of the electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer

Preden Roulleau, F. Portier, D. C. Glattli, P. Roche, A. Cavanna, G. Gaini, U. Gennser, D. Mailly

Published 2007-04-05, updated 2007-10-15Version 3

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.