Decoherence of fermions subject to a quantum bath

Abstract

The destruction of quantum-mechanical phase coherence by a fluctuating quantum bath has been investigated mostly for a single particle. However, for electronic transport through disordered samples and mesoscopic interference setups, we have to treat a many-fermion system subject to a quantum bath. Here, we review a novel technique for treating this situation in the case of ballistic interferometers, and discuss its application to the electronic Mach-Zehnder setup. We use the results to bring out the main features of decoherence in a many-fermion system, and briefly discuss the same ideas in the context of weak localization.