Interfering Single Electrons: Quantum information processing requires the generation of indistinguishable and coherent particles. While these have been demonstrated for photons, carrying it over for electrons and the possibility of quantum electronic implementations has been challenging. Using two independent single-electron sources patterned into a two-dimensional electron gas, Bocquillon et al. (p. 1054 , published online 24 January; see the Perspective by Schönenberger ) performed single-electron interference experiments. The results demonstrate that the generated electrons can possess the desired properties for potential quantum applications.

The edge channels of the quantum Hall effect provide one dimensional chiral and ballistic wires along which electrons can be guided in an optics‐like setup. Electronic propagation can then be analyzed using concepts and tools derived from optics. After a brief review of electron optics experiments performed using stationary current sources which continuously emit electrons in the conductor, this paper focuses on triggered sources, which can generate on‐demand a single particle state. It first outlines the electron optics formalism and its analogies and differences with photon optics and then turns to the presentation of single electron emitters and their characterization through the measurements of the average electrical current and its correlations. This is followed by a discussion of electron quantum optics experiments in the Hanbury‐Brown and Twiss geometry where two‐particle interferences occur. Finally, Coulomb interactions effects and their influence on single electron states are considered.

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.

We study the injection $n$ of electrons in a quantum conductor using voltage pulses applied on a contact. We particularly consider the case of Lorentzian voltage pulses. When carrying integer charge, they are known to provide electronic states with a minimal number of excitations, while any other type of pulses are accompanied with a neutral cloud of electron and hole excitations. We focus on the low-frequency shot noise arising when the excitations are partitioned by a single scatterer. Using periodic pulses, the physics can be discussed in the framework of the photon-assisted shot noise. Pulses of arbitrary shape and arbitrary charge are shown to give a marked minimum in the noise when the charge is an integer. The energy-domain characterization of the charge pulse excitations is also given using the shot-noise spectroscopy which reveals the asymmetrical energy spectrum of Lorentzian pulses. Finally, time-domain information is obtained from Hong-Ou-Mandel\char21{}type noise correlations when two trains of pulses generated on opposite contacts collide on the scatterer. For integer Lorentzian, the noise versus the time delay between pulse trains is shown to give a measure of the electron wave-packet autocorrelation function. In order to make contact with recent experiments, all the calculations are made at zero and finite temperatures.