Majorana quasiparticles in ultracold one-dimensional gases

Year: 2018

Authors: Iemini F., Mazza L., Fallani L., Zoller P., Fazio R., Dalmonte M.

Autors Affiliation: Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, Strada Costiera 11, Trieste, Italy; Departement de Physique, Ecole Normale Superieure/PSL Research University, CNRS, 24 rue Lhomond, Paris, F-75005, France; Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Florence, Sesto Fiorentino, I-50019, Italy; LENS European Laboratory for Nonlinear Spectroscopy, Sesto Fiorentino, I-50019, Italy; Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, A-6020, Austria; Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Innsbruck, A-6020, Austria; NEST, Scuola Normale Superiore and Istituto Nanoscienze-CNR, Pisa, I-56126, Italy

Abstract: In this Proceedings we report some recent results on Majorana quasi-particles published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 200404 (2017). We show how angular momentum conservation can stabilise a symmetry-protected quasi-topological phase of matter supporting Majorana quasi-particles as edge modes in one-dimensional cold atom gases. We investigate a number-conserving four-species Hubbard model in the presence of spin-orbit coupling. The latter reduces the global spin symmetry to an angular momentum parity symmetry, which provides an extremely robust protection mechanism that does not rely on any coupling to additional reservoirs. The emergence of Majorana edge modes is elucidated using field theory techniques, and corroborated by density-matrix-renormalization-group simulations. Our results pave the way toward the observation of Majorana edge modes with alkaline-earth-like fermions in optical lattices, where all basic ingredients for our recipe – spin-orbit coupling and strong inter-orbital interactions – have been experimentally realized over the last two years.

Journal/Review:

KeyWords: Ferminos
DOI: 10.1142/11016