Revisiting Coulomb diamond signatures in quantum Hall interferometers

Moreau, Nicolas [UCL] Faniel, Sébastien [UCL] Martins, F. Desplanque, L. [3University Lille, CNRS, Centrale Lille, JUNIA ISEN, University Polytechnique Hauts de France, UMR 8520-IEMN F-59000 Lille, France] Wallart, X. [3University Lille, CNRS, Centrale Lille, JUNIA ISEN, University Polytechnique Hauts de France, UMR 8520-IEMN F-59000 Lille, France] Melinte, Sorin [UCL] Bayot, Vincent [UCL] Hackens, Benoît [UCL]

Coulomb diamonds are the archetypal signatures of Coulomb blockade, a well-known charging effect mainly observed in nanometer-sized electronic islands tunnel-coupled with charge reservoirs. Here, we identify apparent Coulomb diamond features in the scanning gate spectroscopy of a quantum point contact carved out of a semiconductor heterostructure in the quantum Hall regime. Varying the scanning gate parameters and the magnetic field, the diamonds are found to smoothly evolve to checkerboard patterns. To explain this surprising behavior, we put forward a model which relies on the presence of a nanometer-sized Fabry-Pérot quantum Hall interferometer at the center of the constriction with tunable tunneling paths coupling the central part of the interferometer to the quantum Hall channels running along the device edges. Both types of signatures, diamonds and checkerboards, and the observed transition, are reproduced by simply varying the interferometer size and the transmission probabilities at the tunneling paths. The proposed interpretation of diamond phenomenology will likely lead to revisiting previous data, and opens the way toward engineering more complex interferometric devices with nanoscale dimensions.