Shot Noise and the Transmission of Dilute Laughlin Quasiparticles

Abstract

We analyze theoretically a three-terminal geometry in a fractional quantum Hall system - studied in a recent experiment - which allows a dilute beam of Laughlin quasiparticles to be prepared and subsequently scattered by a point contact. Employing a chiral Luttinger liquid description of the nu^{-1} = m integer edge states, we compute the current and noise of the quasiparticle beam after transmission through the point contact at finite temperature and bias voltage. A re-fermionization procedure at m=2 allows the current and noise to be computed non-perturbatively for arbitrary transparency of the point contact. Surprisingly, we find for weak backscattering the zero temperature limit is subtle and singular even at fixed finite bias voltage. In particular, at T=0 the incident charge e/m quasiparticles are either reflected or else Andreev scattered (backscattering a charge (-1 + 1/m)e quasihole and transmitting an electron) - Laughlin quasiparticles are not transmitted in this limit. A direct signature of these Andreev processes should be accessible in a particular cross-correlation noise measurement that we propose.