Majorana Fermion May Have Been Spotted At TU Delft

Posted by Unknown on Thursday March 1, 2012 @08:03AM from the secrets-of-the-universe dept.

vikingpower writes "A research group at Technical University Delft around prof. Kouwenhoven has probably not only spotted pairs of so-called Majorana Fermions for the first time (these had been predicted to exist by the Italian physicist Ettore Majorana), but also demonstrated that, by generating them at the end of an Indium-Arsenide microwire, quantum computing with them may have come one more step closer to reality. The excitement around Prof. Kouwenhoven at the American Physical Society annual congress in Boston, after he completed his presentation, was considerable.A nice illustration is provided by this newspaper article (in Dutch)."

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Picture label wrong, it's indium-antimonide, by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-01 08:18 · Score: 3, Insightful

The picture and article differ in the wire composition, so which is it?
indium-antimonide or indium-arsenide?
Re:[a,a+]=1 by zakaryah · 2012-03-01 11:35 · Score: 3, Insightful

For fermions, the canonical commutation relations must use the anticommutator: {a,b} = ab + ba. The Majorana fermion is a fermion. But, that doesn't completely answer your question, since you could correctly apply your reasoning to bosons which are their own antiparticle, like the photon, to claim that [a,a+]=0. But you have to keep in mind that the antiparticle of a photon is time-reversed compared to that photon - a+ and a are still distinct.