Dephasing in a Luttinger liquid interferometer

Hyun-Woo Lee

Pohang University of Science and Technology, Department of Physics, Pohang, South Korea

We propose an electron interferometer which contains a finite segement of Luttinger liquid as a tool to study electron coherence in an interacting system. By analyzing the interference current through the setup, we find electron coherence is not a simple monotonic decaying function of distance, even at high temperature where the level discreteness can be ignored. This surprising result is attributed to the charge fractionalization by plasmonic excitations.

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