Chiral Rashba Spin Textures in Ultra-Cold Fermi Gases

Published

April 21, 2011

Author(s)

Ian B. Spielman, Jay Sau, Rajdeep Sensarma, Stephen Powell, Sankar Das Sarma

Abstract

Spin-orbit 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 ultra-cold atomic systems make them ideal for quantum computation applications, however, the spin-orbit (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.

Citation

Physical Review B

Pub Type

Journals

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DOI Link

Keywords

Bose Einstein Condensation, quantum phase transitions

Citation

Spielman, I. , Sau, J. , Sensarma, R. , Powell, S. and Das, S. (2011), Chiral Rashba Spin Textures in Ultra-Cold Fermi Gases, Physical Review B, [online], https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.83.140510 (Accessed October 10, 2025)