title: Chaos, coherence, and the double-slit experiment.
abstract: We investigate the influence that classical dynamics has on interference patterns in coherence experiments. We calculate the time-integrated probability current through an absorbing screen and the conductance through a doubly connected ballistic cavity, both in an Aharonov-Bohm geometry with forward scattering only. We show how interference fringes in the probability current generically disappear in the case of a chaotic system with small openings, and how they may persist in the case of an integrable cavity. Simultaneously, the typical, sample dependent amplitude of the flux-sensitive g(phi) part of the conductance survives in all cases, and becomes universal in the case of a chaotic cavity. In the presence of dephasing by fluctuations of the electric potential in one arm of the Aharonov-Bohm loop, we find an exponential damping of the flux-dependent part of the conductance, g(phi) proportional exp[-tauL/tauphi, in term of the traversal time tauL through the arm and the dephasing time tauphi. This extends previous works on dephasing in ballistic systems to the case of many conducting channels.
authors.affiliation: Département de Physique Théorique, Université de Genève, CH-1211 Genève 4, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Philippe
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Jacquod