Project description
Inducing unprecedented superfluidity with a novel 2D ultracold atomic gas system
The discovery that helium flows without resistance through very thin tubes was made more than a century ago, as was the discovery that electricity flows through some metals with no resistance. Since then, quantum mechanics has supported advances in our theoretical and experimental understanding of superfluidity and superconductivity. Two-dimensional (2D) systems appear to be a sort of boundary with dimensions above and below behaving differently from a classical and quantum perspective. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the ToPIKS project is hoping to experimentally observe and characterise a kind of superfluidity never before seen with the help of a novel 2D ultracold atomic gas system.
Objective
Topological P-wave superfluids with Isotopic K mixtureS:
Pairing of fermions lies at the heart of superfluidity and superconductivity, paradigmatic many-body phenomena arising at all energy scales in Nature – from ultracold to Quark matter. In particular, pairing between fermions with non-zero angular momentum emerges as a key mechanism at the basis of a wealth of unconventional fermionic superfluids, as for the A phase in 3He or electrons in high-Tc superconductors. More specifically, p-wave pairing in 2D is expected to induce superfluid phases with non-trivial topological features, as chirality and anyonic vortex excitations with non-Abelian braiding statistics.
The high level of control over the system parameters, together with detection and probing capabilities down to the single atom level, makes of ultracold atomic gases an ideal platform towards the realization and investigation of such paradigmatic yet elusive strongly interacting phases. Despite this, the experimental observation of p-wave superfluidity in atomic gases has never been achieved so far.
ToPIKS plans to realize a 2D system with strong p-wave interactions in ultracold Bose-Fermi mixtures of 39K and 40K atoms, on the repulsive side of a Fose-Bose s-wave Feshbach resonance, where the system sustains a heteronuclear fermionic molecular state. The virtual exchange of the lighter 39K bosonic atoms between two 39K40K molecules will in turn induce an effective dimer-dimer p-wave attraction.
The key novelty of this approach consists in the possibility to stabilize the system against inelastic losses by promoting a small but finite Bose-Bose repulsion. This is a striking advantage in comparison with previously existing systems exploiting homonuclear p-wave Feshbach resonances, intrinsically suffering from strong 3-body recombination. At the same time, the system maintains the high degree of controllability of atomic gases with Feshbach tunable interactions.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
08860 Castelldefels
Spain