Creation, manipulation and detection of Majorana fermions with cold atoms in optical lattice

Abstract

We propose an experimental scheme to simulate the transverse field Ising model with cold atoms trapped in one-dimensional optical lattice. Majorana fermions are created at the ends of the optical lattice segment in topological phase. By controlling the addressing lasers, one can move, fuse and braid them. We also show that the non-Abelian braiding statistics of Majorana fermions can be demonstrated unambiguously through the construction of two braiding operations and distinguishing the resulting two output orthogonal collective spin states. A nice feature of the scheme is that the strong fluorescence provided by the collective spin state can be readily detected in experiment.