title: Electron quantum optics: partitioning electrons one by one.
abstract: We have realized a quantum optics like Hanbury Brown-Twiss (HBT) experiment by partitioning, on an electronic beam splitter, single elementary electronic excitations produced one by one by an on-demand emitter. We show that the measurement of the output currents correlations in the HBT geometry provides a direct counting, at the single charge level, of the elementary excitations (electron-hole pairs) generated by the emitter at each cycle. We observe the antibunching of low energy excitations emitted by the source with thermal excitations of the Fermi sea already present in the input leads of the splitter, which suppresses their contribution to the partition noise. This effect is used to probe the energy distribution of the emitted wave packets.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire Pierre Aigrain, Ecole Normale Supérieure, CNRS (UMR 8551), Université P. et M. Curie, 24 rue Lhomond, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France.
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Bocquillon
authors.forename: F D
authors.initials: FD
authors.lastname: Parmentier
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Grenier
authors.forename: J-M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Berroir
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Degiovanni
authors.forename: D C
authors.initials: DC
authors.lastname: Glattli
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Plaçais
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cavanna
authors.forename: Y
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Jin
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Fève