Induced p-wave superfluidity in two dimensions: Brane world in cold atoms and nonrelativistic defect CFTs

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to realize p-wave superfluidity in two-dimensional cold atom systems using interspecies Feshbach resonances, with potential applications in topological quantum computation and connections to nonrelativistic defect CFTs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel scheme to induce p-wave superfluidity in 2D Fermi gases via a 3D background, and explores the system's properties in the unitarity limit as a nonrelativistic defect CFT.

Findings

Pairing gap with p_x+ip_y symmetry computed in weak-coupling regime.

Potential for experimentally accessible critical temperatures.

Analysis of the system as a nonrelativistic defect conformal field theory.

Abstract

We propose to use a two-species Fermi gas with the interspecies s-wave Feshbach resonance to realize p-wave superfluidity in two dimensions. By confining one species of fermions in a two-dimensional plane immersed in the background three-dimensional Fermi sea of the other species, an attractive interaction is induced between two-dimensional fermions. We compute the pairing gap in the weak-coupling regime and show that it has the symmetry of p_x+ip_y. Because the magnitude of the pairing gap increases toward the unitarity limit, it is possible that the critical temperature for the p_x+ip_y-wave superfluidity becomes within experimental reach. The resulting system has a potential application to topological quantum computation using vortices with non-Abelian statistics. We also discuss aspects of our system in the unitarity limit as a "nonrelativistic defect conformal field theory (CFT)". The reduced Schr\"odinger algebra, operator-state correspondence, scaling dimensions of composite operators, and operator product expansions are investigated.