Induced p-wave superfluidity in two dimensions: Brane world in cold atoms and nonrelativistic defect CFTs Original Research Article

We propose to use a two-species Fermi gas with the interspecies s-wave Feshbach resonance to realize p-wave superfluidity in two dimensions. By confining one species of fermions in a two-dimensional plane immersed in the background three-dimensional Fermi sea of the other species, an attractive interaction is induced between two-dimensional fermions. We compute the pairing gap in the weak-coupling regime and show that it has the symmetry of image. Because the magnitude of the pairing gap increases toward the unitarity limit, it is possible that the critical temperature for the image-wave superfluidity becomes within experimental reach. The resulting system has a potential application to topological quantum computation using vortices with non-Abelian statistics. We also discuss aspects of our system in the unitarity limit as a “nonrelativistic defect conformal field theory (CFT)”. The reduced Schrödinger algebra, operator-state correspondence, scaling dimensions of composite operators, and operator product expansions are investigated.