The prospect of using Majorana fermions for application to fault-tolerant quantum computation has recently received much attention. Majorana fermions can be created in px+ipy topological superfluids or at the ends of a 1D p-wave superfluid. Exploring p-wave pairing in ultracold atomic gases has been difficult due to severe atom loss from three-body recombination near a p-wave Feshbach resonance. Three-body loss is predicted to be suppressed, however, in quasi-one-dimensional (quasi-1D), due to the extended wavefunctions of the open-channel dominant Feshbach dimers.

In this work, we have experimentally studied collisional loss of a quasi-1D spin-polarized Fermi gas near a p-wave Feshbach resonance using ultracold 6Li atoms confined to a 2D optical lattice. We measured the atom loss as a function of time and extracted the three-body recombination rate, L3. We also analyzed the atom loss as a two-step cascade three-body recombination model, in which weakly bound dimers are formed prior to their loss arising from atom-dimer collisions. In this thesis, the comparison of the experimental results and the theoretical predictions are presented. The implications of these measurements for observing p-wave pairing in quasi-1D are discussed in this thesis.