title: Detecting the Majorana fermion surface state of 3He-B through spin relaxation.
abstract: The Majorana fermion, which can be useful for topological quantum computation, has eluded detection. (3)He-B, recently shown to be a time-reversal invariant topological superfluid, has a gapless Majorana fermion surface state. We show here that an electron spin relaxation experiment can detect this surface state--its Majorana nature through the Zeeman field direction dependence of the relaxation time 1/T(1) proportional, proportional to sin(2)theta, where theta is the angle between the field and the surface normal. We propose an experimental setup where an electron inside a nanobubble is injected below the (3)He liquid surface.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, McCullough Building, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
authors.forename: Suk Bum
authors.initials: SB
authors.lastname: Chung
authors.forename: Shou-Cheng
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Zhang