Scientists find Majorana fermion, still looking for way to explain it

Like it? Share it!

Scientists find Majorana fermion, still looking for way to explain it

Scientists at TU Delft’s Kavli Institute and the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter have detected a Marjorana particle for the very first time, causing “great excitement among scientists!” Scientists are excited, so that makes me excited… but what the fuck is a Marjorana fermion?

The funny name comes from Ettore Majorana, an Italian mathematician and physicist whose idea it was. Essentially, a Majorana fermion is a particle that’s its own anti-particle. Bear with me for a second here: you know how there’s matter and antimatter, and when they come together they annihilate each other and release tons of energy and you get things like warp drives? Well, a Majorana fermion works just like that, except there’s no “anti-.” Instead, when two of them come together, they just annihilate right away.

It’s possible that neutrinos are a type of Majorana fermion (we’re not quite sure), but we do now know that these things actually exist. Der Nederlanders were able to generate a pair of them using an indium antemonide nanowire, covered with a gold contact and partially covered with a superconducting niobium contact, which (in retrospect) seems like a totally obvious way to go about doing it. Like, duh.

Besides a demonstration of the cleverness of der Nederlanders, what’s the point of a Majorana fermion? There’s just one big thing, really: quantum computing. Unlike the quantum computers we’ve got right now, which are touchy little things, a quantum computer based on Majorana fermions would be “exceptionally stable and barely sensitive to external influences.” Oh, and Majorana fermions may also be a part of all that dark matter stuff that’s supposed to make up a big chunk of our universe, so they’ve got that going for them, too.

Via