Kadin Thompson

Dr Kadin Thompson

Office: 537 Mott Bld

TCM Group, Cavendish Laboratory
19 JJ Thomson Avenue,
Cambridge, CB3 0HE UK.

Research

I am postdoc based at the School of Chemical and Physical Sciences at the Victoria Universtiy of Wellington, kindly hosted by Prof. Lamacraft's group at TCM. Broadly speaking I am interested in understanding the properties of unconventional superfluids, especially those with topological order and, more recently, odd-frequency correlations. My PhD focused on describing a topological phase transition in a 2D system of ultracold atoms. In particular, it is possible to engineer this transition to be first order so that phase separation between nontopological and topological superfluids is possible. Given that the resulting phase boundary entails an interface between topologically-distinct materials, this set up might provide a novel way of experimentally detecting -- and possibly even controlling -- gapless edge states known as Majorana fermions.

In Plain English

Electrons are tiny charged particles which orbit the atomic nucleus and flow together in wires to gives us electricity. In some materials, called superconductors, electrons are able to attract each other and form special co-ordinated pairs called Cooper pairs. In conventional superconductors the Cooper pairs are made from electrons that spin in opposite directions. But this is not the only possiblity: the various ways of building different kinds of Cooper pairs provides us with a set of so-called unconventional superconductors. Some of these are highly sought after in industry, such as high-temperature superconductors which might revolutionalise the way we transport electrical current. One particular kind of unconventional superconductor I am interested in are those with topological properties. The word "topological" is used here because these superconductors have special Majorana states which are irremovable, just like the hole of a donut. Such irremovable states might be useful vehicles for storing quantum information robustly, which comes in handy when building fault-tolerant quantum computers.

Featured Publications

Chiral two-dimensional p-wave superfluid from s-wave pairing in the Bose-Einstein regime , Thompson K., Brand J., Zuelicke U., Phys. Rev. A , 101 013613
Coexistence of topological and nontopological Fermi-superfluid phases, Thompson K., Brand J., Zuelicke U., Phys. Rev. Res. , 3 043201
Andreev bound states at boundaries of polarised 2D Fermi superfluids with s-wave pairing and spin-orbit coupling , Thompson K., Brand J., Zuelicke U., SciPost Phys. , 14(5) 115
Microscopic Theory of Topological Superfluidity in 2D Fermi Gases , Doctoral thesis, Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington, 2023