Chiral Rashba spin textures in ultra-cold Fermi gases

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 makes 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 ${}^{40}\mathrm{K}$ 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.

4 pages, 3 figures

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