Unveiling the bosonic nature of an ultrashort few-electron pulse

Grégoire Roussely (1) , Everton Arrighi (1) , Giorgos Georgiou (1, 2) , Shintaro Takada (1, 3) , Martin Schalk (1) , Matias Urdampilleta (1) , Arne Ludwig (4, 5) , Andreas Wieck (4, 5) , Pacome Armagnat (6) , Thomas Kloss (6) , Xavier Waintal (6) , Tristan Meunier (1) , Christopher Bäuerle (1)

1 NEEL - QuantECA - Circuits électroniques quantiques Alpes
2 IMEP-LAHC - Institut de Microélectronique, Electromagnétisme et Photonique - Laboratoire d'Hyperfréquences et Caractérisation
3 AIST - National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
4 RUB - Ruhr University Bochum = Ruhr-Universität Bochum
5 Lehrstuhl für Angewandte Festkörperphysik
6 GT - Laboratory of Quantum Theory

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 probe for directly investigating real-time dynamics of fractionalisation phenomena in low-dimensional conductors.

Domaines: Physique [physics]

Grégoire Roussely, Everton Arrighi, Giorgos Georgiou, Shintaro Takada, Martin Schalk, et al.. Unveiling the bosonic nature of an ultrashort few-electron pulse. Nature Communications, 2018, 9, pp.2811. ⟨10.1038/s41467-018-05203-7⟩. ⟨cea-01881966⟩