Hulet, Randall G.2021-05-132021-05-132021-052021-05-13May 2021Chang, Ya-Ting. "Collisional loss of one-dimensional fermions near a p-wave Feshbach resonance." (2021) Diss., Rice University. <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1911/110603">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/110603</a>.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/110603The prospect of using Majorana fermions for application to fault-tolerant quantum computation has recently received much attention. Majorana fermions can be created in $p_x + ip_y$ 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 $^6$Li atoms confined to a 2D optical lattice. We measured the atom loss as a function of time and extracted the three-body recombination rate, $L_3$. 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.application/pdfengCopyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.p-wave Feshbach resonancethree-body lossfermions in quasi-1DThesis2021-05-13