Control of electron-hole pair generation by biharmonic voltage drive of a quantum point contact

A time-dependent electromagnetic field creates electron-hole excitations in a Fermi sea at low temperature. We show that the electron-hole pairs can be generated in a controlled way using harmonic and biharmonic time-dependent voltages applied to a quantum contact, and we obtain the probabilities of the pair creations. For a biharmonic voltage drive, we find that the probability of a pair creation decreases in the presence of an in-phase second harmonic. This accounts for the suppression of the excess noise observed experimentally (Gabelli and Reulet, arXiv:1205.3638), proving that dynamic control and detection of elementary excitations in quantum conductors are within the reach of the present technology