Stable Topological Superfluid Phase of Ultracold Polar Fermionic Molecules

Abstract

We show that single-component fermionic polar molecules confined to a 2D geometry and dressed by a microwave field may acquire an attractive 1/r(3) dipole-dipole interaction leading to superfluid p-wave pairing at sufficiently low temperatures even in the BCS regime. The emerging state is the topological p(x) + ip(y) phase promising for topologically protected quantum information processing. The main decay channel is via collisional transitions to dressed states with lower energies and is rather slow, setting a lifetime of the order of seconds at 2D densities approximately 10(8) cm(-2).