Beam Splitters, Interferometers and Hong-Ou-Mandel Effect for Interacting Bosonic and Fermionic Walkers in a Lattice

Tight binding lattices offer a unique platform in which particles may be either static or mobile depending on the potential barrier between the sites. It is tempting to use the static and mobile versions of the particles to store and process information respectively. Motivated by this, we show how a beam splitter between two hopping particles traveling from distant lattice sites can be implemented by an on-site potential at the center of the lattice. We show how this enables the two mode Hong-Ou-Mandel effect to be observed, and how the intra-site interaction results in a crossover from bosonic to fermionic behavior close to the superfluid-Mott transition point. A tunable Mach-Zehnder interferometer is implemented adding a step-like potential. Finally we discuss how our results may pave the way towards the realization of a KLM quantum computer with bosonic neutral atoms in a lattice setup.