Probing non-Abelian statistics of Majorana fermions in ultracold atomic superfluid

TL;DR

This paper proposes an experimental method to directly observe the non-Abelian statistics of Majorana fermions in ultracold atomic superfluids by braiding and detecting their quantum states through Raman spectroscopy.

Contribution

It introduces a feasible experimental setup for probing Majorana fermions' non-Abelian statistics in ultracold atoms using braiding operations and Raman spectroscopy.

Findings

Different braiding orders produce orthogonal states detectable by spectroscopy

A laser configuration is designed to generate necessary spin-orbit coupling and Zeeman field

The approach enables direct observation of Majorana fermions' non-Abelian statistics

Abstract

We propose an experiment to directly probe the non-Abelian statistics of Majorana fermions by braiding them in an s-wave superfluid of ultracold atoms. We show different orders of braiding operations give orthogonal output states that can be distinguished through Raman spectroscopy. Realization of Majorana bound states in an s-wave superfluid requires strong spin-orbital coupling and a controllable Zeeman field in the perpendicular direction. We present a simple laser configuration to generate the artificial spin-orbital coupling and the required Zeeman field in the dark state subspace.