The Behavior of Electronic Interferometers in the Non-Linear Regime

We investigate theoretically the behavior of the current oscillations in an electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) as a function of its source bias. Recently, The MZI interference visibility showed an unexplained lobe pattern behavior with a peculiar phase rigidity. Moreover, the effect did not depend on the MZI paths difference. We argue that these effects may be a new many-body manifestation of particle-wave duality of quantum mechanics. When biasing the interferometer sources beyond the linear response regime, quantum shot-noise (a particle phenomena) must affect the interference pattern of the electrons that creates it, as a result from a simple invariance argument. An approximate solution of the interacting Hamiltonian indeed shows that the interference visibility has a lobe pattern with applied bias with a period proportional to the average path length and independent of the paths difference, together with a phase rigidity.