Collisional loss of one-dimensional fermions near a <i>p</i>-wave Feshbach resonance

Recent interest in fault-tolerant quantum computing has focused attention on non-abelian anyons [1] which may be created in 1D p-wave superconductors, or, as discussed here, in an atomic Fermi gas with p-wave interactions. Severe atom losses, however, due to three-body recombination near the p-wave Feshbach resonance (FR) has, thus far, prevented the realization of p-wave superfluids in ultracold atomic gases. Motivated by recent theoretical work predicting the suppression of losses in quasi-1D [2], we measured the collisional loss of a spin-polarized Fermi gas near a p-wave FR using ⁶Li atoms confined to a 2D optical lattice [3]. We observe little dependence of the peak three-body loss rate on the confinement strength. We find a possible suppression, however, by analzing the data using a cascade model in which Feshbach dimers are first formed, then are lost to the creation of deeply-bound molecules by atom-dimer collisions. We will present our results and discuss the implications of these measurements for observing p-wave pairing in quasi-1D.

[1] A. Kitaev, Ann. Phys. 303, 2-30 (2003).
[2] L. Zhou and X. Cui, Phys. Rev. A 96, 30701 (2017).
[3] Y. T. Chang et al, to be published in Phys. Rev. Lett., arXiv:2007.03723.