Minimal excitation states of electrons in one-dimensional wires

A strategy is proposed to excite particles from a Fermi sea in a noise-free fashion by electromagnetic pulses with realistic parameters. We show that by using quantized pulses of simple form one can suppress the particle-hole pairs which are created by a generic excitation. The resulting many-body states are characterized by one or several particles excited above the Fermi surface accompanied by no disturbance below it. These excitations carry charge which is integer for noninteracting electron gas and fractional for Luttinger liquid. The operator algebra describing these excitations is derived, and a method of their detection which relies on noise measurement is proposed.