Scaling behavior of electron decoherence in a graphene Mach-Zehnder interferometer

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, many efforts have been made to understand and control decoherence in 2D electron systems. In particular, several types of electronic interferometers have been considered in GaAs heterostructures, in order to protect the interfering electrons from decoherence. Nevertheless, it is now understood that several intrinsic decoherence sources fundamentally limit more advanced quantum manipulations. Here, we show that graphene offers a unique possibility to reach a regime where the decoherence is frozen and to study unexplored regimes of electron interferometry. We probe the decoherence of electron channels in a graphene quantum Hall PN junction, forming a Mach-Zehnder interferometer(1,2), and unveil a scaling behavior of decay of the interference visibility with the temperature scaled by the interferometer length. It exhibits a remarkable crossover from an exponential decay at higher temperature to an algebraic decay at lower temperature where almost no decoherence occurs, a regime previously unobserved in GaAs interferometers.