2010/12/21 by Jay D. Sau, Rajdeep Sensarma, Stephen Powell +2 · 6 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Condensed matter physics #Coupling (piping) #Fermion #MAJORANA #Materials science #Observable #Physics #Quantum #Quantum computer #Quantum many-body systems #Quantum mechanics #Quasiparticle #Spin (aerodynamics) #Superconductivity #Topological Materials and Phenomena #Topological insulator #Topological order #Topology (electrical circuits) #Ultracold atom #cond-mat.quant-gas #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.83.140510
published as Phys. Rev. B 83, 140510(R) (2011) · 4 pages, 3 figures
arxiv created 2010/12/21 · openalex publication_date 2011/04/21 · arxiv updated 2011/04/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Spin-orbit (SO) coupling is an important ingredient in many recently discovered phenomena such as the spin-Hall effect and topological insulators. Of particular interest is topological superconductivity, with its potential application in topological quantum computation. The absence of disorder in ultracold atomic systems makes them ideal for quantum computation applications; however, the SO coupling schemes proposed thus far are experimentally impractical owing to large spontaneous emission rates in the alkali fermions. In this paper, we develop a scheme to generate Rashba SO coupling with a low spontaneous emission extension to a recent experiment. We show that this scheme generates a Fermi surface spin texture for 40K atoms, which is observable in time-of-flight measurements. The chiral spin texture, together with conventional s-wave interactions, leads to topological superconductivity and non-Abelian Majorana quasiparticles.