Exchange-phase erasure in anyonic Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometry

Two-particle interferometry is an important tool for extracting the exchange statistics of quantum particles. We theoretically investigate the prospects of such interferometry to probe the statistics of pointlike anyonic excitations injected in a Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) setup based on a quantum point contact device in the fractional quantum Hall regime. We compute the standard HOM ratio, i.e., the ratio of tunneling noises for two- and one-particle injections, and find that for pointlike anyons it only depends on the temperature and the anyon scaling dimension. Importantly, the latter is not necessarily related to the exchange phase. In fact, we establish that the HOM ratio does not reveal the exchange phase of the injected anyons: For injection-time delays that are small compared to the thermal timescale, we find that the exchange phase accumulated due to time-domain braiding between injected and thermally activated anyons is erased due to two mutually canceling subprocesses. In contrast, for time delays large compared to the thermal time, only a single subprocess contributes to the braiding, but the accumulated phase is canceled in the HOM ratio. These findings suggest caution when interpreting HOM interferometry experiments with anyons, and approaches beyond the standard HOM ratio are thus necessary to extract anyonic statistics with two-particle interferometry experiments.