Edge-channel interference controlled by Landau level filling

Abstract

We study the visibility of Aharonov-Bohm interference in an electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer in the integer quantum Hall regime. The visibility is controlled by the filling factor $\ensuremath{\nu}$ and is observed only between $\ensuremath{\nu}\ensuremath{\approx}2.0$ and 1.0, with an unexpected maximum near $\ensuremath{\nu}=1.5$. Three energy scales extracted from the temperature and voltage dependences of the visibility change in a very similar way with the filling factor, indicating that the different aspects of the interference depend sensitively on the local structure of the compressible and incompressible strips forming the quantum Hall edge channels.