No Arabic abstract
Recent studies in the realization of Majorana fermion (MF) quasiparticles have focused on engineering topological superconductivity by combining conventional superconductors and spin-textured electronic materials. We propose an effective model to create unpaired MFs at a honeycomb lattice edge by generalizing a 2-dimensional topologically nontrivial Haldane model and introducing textured pairings. The core idea is to add both the spin-singlet and textured spin-triplet pairings to a pseudospin-state dependent, time-reversal symmetry (TRS) noninvariant honeycomb lattice, and to satisfy generalized sweet spot conditions as in the Kitaev chain model. Our model has a gapped superconducting phase and a gapless phase; either phase may have zero or nonzero topological winding numbers. The discriminant that distinguishes those two phases gives a measure of TRS breaking and may have more general implications. Effective Majorana zero modes arise at edges in distinct phases with different degrees of degeneracy. Our theoretical model motivates concepts, such as textured pairings and the strength of TRS breaking, that may play important roles in future implementation of MFs with cold atoms in optical lattices.
Ultracold Fermi gases trapped in honeycomb optical lattices provide an intriguing scenario, where relativistic quantum electrodynamics can be tested. Here, we generalize this system to non-Abelian quantum electrodynamics, where massless Dirac fermions interact with effective non-Abelian gauge fields. We show how in this setup a variety of topological phase transitions occur, which arise due to massless fermion pair production events, as well as pair annihilation events of two kinds: spontaneous and strongly-interacting induced. Moreover, such phase transitions can be controlled and characterized in optical lattice experiments.
We study cold heteronuclear atom ion collisions by immersing a trapped single ion into an ultracold atomic cloud. Using ultracold atoms as reaction targets, our measurement is sensitive to elastic collisions with extremely small energy transfer. The observed energy-dependent elastic atom-ion scattering rate deviates significantly from the prediction of Langevin but is in full agreement with the quantum mechanical cross section. Additionally, we characterize inelastic collisions leading to chemical reactions at the single particle level and measure the energy-dependent reaction rate constants. The reaction products are identified by in-trap mass spectrometry, revealing the branching ratio between radiative and non-radiative charge exchange processes.
We explore the topological properties of non-Hermitian nodal-link semimetals with dissipative cold atoms in a three-dimensional optical lattice. We construct a two-band continuum model in three dimensions with a spin-dependent gain and loss, where the exceptional points in the energy spectrum can comprise a double Hopf link. The topology of the bulk band is characterized by a winding number defined for a one-dimensional loop in the momentum space and a topological transition of the nodal structures emerges as the change of the non-Hermiticity strength. A non-Bloch theory is built to describe the corresponding lattice model which has anomalous bulk-boundary correspondence. Furthermore, we propose that the model can be realized using ultracold fermionic atoms in an optical lattice and the exceptional nodal links as well as the topological properties can be detected by measuring the atomic spin textures.
In this paper we present a hybrid scheme for topological quantum computation in a system of cold atoms trapped in an atomic lattice. A topological qubit subspace is defined using Majorana fermions which emerge in a network of atomic Kitaev one-dimensional wires. We show how braiding can be efficiently implemented in this setup and propose a direct way to demonstrate the non-Abelian nature of Majorana fermions via a single parity measurement. We then introduce a proposal for the efficient, robust and reversible mapping of the topological qubits to a conventional qubit stored in a single atom. There, well-controlled standard techniques can be used to implement the missing gates required for universal computation. Our setup is complemented with an efficient non-destructive protocol to check for errors in the mapping.
We study the dynamics of neutral cold atoms in an $L$-shaped crossed-beam optical waveguide formed by two perpendicular red-detuned lasers of different intensities and a blue-detuned laser at the corner. Complemented with a vibrational cooling process this setting works as a one-way device or atom diode.