Suppression of interference in quantum Hall Mach-Zehnder geometry by upstream neutral modes

Moshe Goldstein, Yuval Gefen

Published 2016-05-19Version 1

Mach-Zehnder interferometry has been proposed as a probe for detecting the statistics of anyonic quasiparticles in fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states. Here we focus on interferometers made of multimode edge states with upstream modes. We find that the interference visibility is suppressed due to downstream-upstream mode entanglement; the latter serves as a "which path" detector to the downstream interfering trajectories. Our analysis tackles a concrete realization of filling factor 2/3, but its applicability goes beyond that specific case, and encompasses the recent observation of ubiquitous emergence of upstream neutral modes in FQH states. The latter, according to our analysis, goes hand in hand with the failure to observe Mach-Zehnder anyonic interference in fractional states. We point out how charge-neutral mode disentanglement will resuscitate the interference signal.