title: Majorana fermions in equilibrium and in driven cold-atom quantum wires.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Quantum Information, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA.
authors.forename: Liang
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.forename: Takuya
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Kitagawa
authors.forename: Jason
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Alicea
authors.forename: A R
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: Akhmerov
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Pekker
authors.forename: Gil
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Refael
authors.forename: J Ignacio
authors.initials: JI
authors.lastname: Cirac
authors.forename: Eugene
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Demler
authors.forename: Mikhail D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Lukin
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Zoller