2011/02/28 by Liang Jiang, Takuya Kitagawa, Jason Alicea +7 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.quant-gas #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.106.220402
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 220402 (2011) · 4 pages, 3 figures; references added
arxiv created 2011/03/02 · arxiv updated 2013/07/09
We introduce a new approach to create and detect Majorana fermions using optically trapped 1D fermionic atoms. In our proposed setup, two internal states of the atoms couple via an optical Raman transition---simultaneously inducing an effective spin-orbit interaction and magnetic field---while a background molecular BEC cloud generates s-wave pairing for the atoms. The resulting cold atom quantum wire supports Majorana fermions at phase boundaries between topologically trivial and nontrivial regions, as well as `Floquet Majorana fermions' when the system is periodically driven. We analyze experimental parameters, detection schemes, and various imperfections.