A toolbox for elementary fermions with a dipolar Fermi gas in a 3D optical lattice

Abstract

There has been growing interest in investigating properties of elementary particles predicted by the standard model. Examples of such studies include exploring their low-energy analogs in condensed matter system, where they arise as collective states or quasiparticles. Here we show that a toolbox for systematically engineering the emergent elementary fermions, i.e., Dirac, Weyl and Majorana fermions, can be built in a single atomic system composed of a spinless magnetic dipolar Fermi gas in a 3D optical lattice. The designed direction-dependent dipole-dipole interaction leads to both the basic building block, i.e, in-plane p+ip superfluid pairing instability and the manipulating tool, i.e, out-of-plane Peierls instability. It is shown that the Peierls instability provides a natural way of tuning the topological nature of p+ip superfluids and thus transform the fermion's nature between distinct emergent particles. Our scheme should open up a new thrust towards searching for elementary particles through manipulating the topology.