After decades of searching, physicists are finally convinced they have created the legendary Majorana fermion.
If confirmed, this would be the first time that a physical phenomenon predicted since 1937 by Italian theorist Ettore Majorana appeared in reality. Majorana fermions are electron-like particles with their own antiparticles. They are neither fermions nor bosons, and instead they obey non-Abelian statistics. The quantum states of such particles are expected to have a high impedance to environmental disturbances, making them ideal candidates for quantum computers.
Majorana fermions predicted from year
1937 but was never seen in practice.
In a paper published in the journal Science recently, physicist Vincent Mourikand Leo P.Kouwenhoven said his team made the Majorana fermion appear by introducing a small circuit board into a magnetic field.
However, according to experts, although the evidence is quite solid, more similar experiments are still needed in the near future to confirm this finding.
Elementary particles always exist in two forms: fermions and bosons. Fermions are particles like electrons, leptons, and quarks. Fermions make up matter and obey the Pauli Exclusion Principle that two particles cannot have the same quantum state at the same time. Meanwhile, Bosons are particles like Photon, Boson W, Boson Z, Gluon…
All fermions have antiparticles, i.e. particles with the same mass but opposite electrode sign. An electron has a negative electrode while its antiparticle, a positron, carries a positive electrode. When an electron comes into contact with its antiparticle (in this case, a positron), the two particles annihilate each other and turn into energetic photons.
But unlike all other fermions, Majorana behaves exactly like its own antiparticle. Only thing, Majorana particles will still cancel each other when exposed to antiparticles.
If Kouwenhoven’s discovery is recognized, Majorana will give people a practical application, which is a simpler and more efficient way of storing information in quantum computing.