Fractionalization of minimal excitations in integer quantum Hall edge channels

Abstract

A theoretical study of the single-electron coherence properties of Lorentzian and rectangular pulses is presented. By combining bosonization and the Floquet scattering approach, the effect of interactions on a periodic source of voltage pulses is computed exactly. When such excitations are injected into one of the channels of a system of two copropagating quantum Hall edge channels, they fractionalize into pulses whose charge and shape reflect the properties of interactions. We show that the dependence of fractionalization-induced electron/hole pair production in the pulses' amplitude contains clear signatures of the fractionalization of the individual excitations. We propose an experimental setup combining a source of Lorentzian pulses and a Hanbury Brown--Twiss interferometer to measure interaction-induced electron/hole pair production and more generally to reconstruct single-electron coherence of these excitations before and after their fractionalization.