THURSDAY, Oct. 4, 12 p.m. 11th floor Gamow Tower
Victor Gurarie
University of Colorado, Boulder
2D p-wave fermionic superfluids: a path towards non-Abelian statistics
It has been recognized for several years that two dimensional p-wave superconductors (or fermionic paired superfluids) support excitations with non-Abelian statistics. In turn, those could be used to built a decoherence free quantum computer. More recently, it was proposed to use atomic gases to create these superfluids. In my talk, I'll discuss what non-Abelian statistics is, why two dimensional p-wave superfluids are expected to have non-Abelian excitations, and how one can attempt to built these superfluids out of cold atomic gases. The p-wave atomic gases created in experiments, including a recent one at JILA, were not stable. I will discuss a possible origin of this instability and whether it can be circumvented.