Non-classical current noise and light emission of an ac-driven tunnel junction

TL;DR

This paper investigates non-classical current noise and light emission in ac-driven tunnel junctions, revealing how periodic driving influences overbias photon emission and extending dynamical Coulomb blockade theory to dynamic conditions.

Contribution

It generalizes DCB theory to ac-driven junctions, explaining overbias light emission through multi-electron processes influenced by periodic voltage.

Findings

Overbias light emission features side kinks at multiples of ac frequency.

Driven junctions show distinct noise and emission characteristics compared to dc.

The theory enables tuning quantum light sources via applied voltages.

Abstract

The non-symmetrized current noise is crucial for the analysis of light emission in nanojunctions. The latter represent non-classical photon emitters whose description requires a full quantum approach. It was found experimentally that light emission can occur with a photon energy exceeding the applied dc voltage, which intuitively should be forbidden due to the Pauli principle. This overbias light emission cannot be described by the single-electron physics, but can be explained by two-electron or even three-electron processes, correlated by a local resonant mode in analogy to the well-known dynamical Coulomb blockade (DCB). Here, we obtain the non-symmetrized noise for junctions driven by an arbitrarily shaped periodic voltage. We find that when the junction is driven, the overbias light emission exhibits intriguingly different features compared to the dc case. In addition to kinks at multiples of the bias voltage, side kinks appear at integer multiples of the ac driving frequency. Our work generalizes the DCB theory of light emission to driven tunnel junctions and opens the avenue for engineered quantum light sources, which can be tuned purely by applied voltages.