Observability of a Majorana phase transition in a few-body model

There is a strong interest in number conserving systems that exhibit Majorana fermions as quasiparticles. We utilize a number conserving analog of the Kitaev wire model due to Iemini et al. in the small-lattice limit to examine topological properties in a realistic ultracold atomic model. This interacting model exhibits several signatures of a topological regime, and the mutual information of opposite ends of the lattice displays a sharp transition even in the few-body limit. Previous results are extended by giving additional experimental signatures to distinguish the topological from the non-topological regime and by calculating timescales to study the transition and experimentally observe Majorana quasiparticles in this system (see the preprint arXiv:2006.08062).