Publication Date:
2014-02-01
Description:
Nature Physics 10, 110 (2014). doi:10.1038/nphys2824 Authors: Zhengkun Fu, Lianghui Huang, Zengming Meng, Pengjun Wang, Long Zhang, Shizhong Zhang, Hui Zhai, Peng Zhang & Jing Zhang The search for topological superconductors is a challenging task. One of the most promising directions is to use spin–orbit coupling through which an s-wave superconductor can induce unconventional p-wave pairing in a spin-polarized metal. Recently, synthetic spin–orbit couplings have been realized in cold-atom systems where instead of a proximity effect, s-wave pairing originates from a resonant coupling between s-wave molecules and itinerant atoms. Here we demonstrate a dynamic process in which spin–orbit coupling coherently produces s-wave Feshbach molecules from a fully polarized Fermi gas, and induces a coherent oscillation between these two. This demonstrates experimentally that spin–orbit coupling does coherently couple singlet and triplet states, and implies that the bound pairs of this system have a triplet p-wave component, which can become a topological superfluid by further cooling to condensation and confinement to one dimension.
Print ISSN:
1745-2473
Electronic ISSN:
1745-2481
Topics:
Physics
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