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

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 p(x) + ip(y). Because the magnitude of the pairing gap increases toward the unitarity limit, it is possible that the critical temperature for the p(x) + ip(y)-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 Schrodinger algebra, operator-state correspondence, scaling dimensions of composite operators, and operator product expansions are investigated. (c) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.