Half-levitons -- zero-energy excitations of a driven Fermi sea

Abstract

A voltage pulse of a Lorentzian shape carrying a half of the flux quantum excites out of a zero-temperature Fermi sea an electron in a mixed state, which looks like a quasi-particle with an effectively fractional charge $e/2$. A prominent feature of such an excitation is a narrow peak in the energy distribution function laying exactly at the Fermi energy $\mu$. Another spectacular feature is that the distribution function has symmetric tails as above as below $\mu$, which results in a zero energy of an excitation. This sounds improbable since at zero temperature all available states below $\mu$ are fully occupied. The resolution is lying in the fact that such a voltage pulse excites also electron-hole pairs which free some space below $\mu$ and thus allow a zero-energy quasi-particle to exist. I discuss also how to address separately electron-hole pairs and a fractionally charged zero-energy excitation in experiment.

6 pages, 3 figures

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• Pseudorandom binary injection of levitons for electron quantum optics
• Fractional charges in conventional sequential electron tunneling
• Heat and charge transport measurements to access single-electron quantum characteristics
• Levitons in superconducting point contacts
• Magnon-driven chiral charge and spin pumping and electron-magnon scattering from time-dependent quantum transport combined with atomistic spin dynamics theory
• Hong-Ou-Mandel heat noise in the quantum Hall regime
• Levitons in helical liquids with Rashba spin-orbit coupling probed by a superconducting contact
• Half-integer charge injection by a Josephson junction without excess noise
• Influence of channel mixing in fermionic Hong-Ou-Mandel experiments
• Ultrashort electron wavepackets via frequency-comb synthesis
• Spectral properties of interacting helical channels driven by Lorentzian pulses
• Photoexcitation in two-dimensional topological insulators: Generating and controlling electron wavepackets in Quantum Spin Hall systems
• Coherent Transport of Levitons Through the Kondo Resonance
• Normal and abnormal electron-hole pairs in a voltage-pulse-driven quantum conductor
• Electron qubits surfing on acoustic waves: review of recent progress
• Quasiparticles states for integer- and fractional-charged electron wave packets
• Adiabatic almost-topological pumping of fractional charges in non-interacting quantum dots
• Levitons in correlated nano-scale systems
• Quantum transport phenomena induced by time-dependent fields
• Correlated two-Leviton states in the fractional quantum Hall regime
• On-demand electron source with tunable energy distribution
• Auto- versus cross-correlation noise
• On-Demand and Tunable Andreev-Conversion of Single-Electron Charge Pulses
• Wigner representation of Andreev-reflected charge pulses
• Periodic source of energy-entangled electrons in helical states coupled to a BCS superconductor