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Scientists Find Long-Sought Majorana Particle
New submitter boner writes "In a follow-up to an earlier Slashdot story, scientists at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands yesterday published their findings that they have indeed found the Majorana particle. The announcement on the university website provides both a summary of the academic paper (PDF) and background of this groundbreaking discovery. Quoting: 'Majorana fermions are very interesting – not only because their discovery opens up a new and uncharted chapter of fundamental physics; they may also play a role in cosmology. A proposed theory assumes that the mysterious ‘dark matter, which forms the greatest part of the universe, is composed of Majorana fermions. Furthermore, scientists view the particles as fundamental building blocks for the quantum computer.'"
Or was it just me?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
This is not like finding the Higgs Boson. The majorana fermion they created was (hard to tell exactly how from TFA) a condensed matter excitation with the properties of a majorana fermion, not a fundamental particle. Pretty cool though.
My understanding is that what's been discovered is a pseudo-particle, a quantum excitation which behaves like a Majorana particle, not an actual particle like an electron or a neutron.
Did I read the article correctly that this was funded by Microsoft? That's sort of coolish...
From one of the articles: "a particle that is its own anti-particle" Can one of the physics geeks on here explain how that works? I was under the impression that when particle and antiparticle meet, they go boom. How can this thing not annihilate? Or is it that this bit of matter *can't* turn into energy? The wikipedia entry on this didn't make any sense to me.
A particle that is its own anti-particle? Sounds pretty special! Of course, that would also describe photons, the commonest particle in the universe.
Come on, science reporting.
Photons are bosons. Bosons being their own antiparticle is nothing unusual. A fermion that is its own antiparticle has never been observed in nature before.
The summary makes it sound like there is a particle that physicists have been seeking called a Majorana particle when in fact a Majorana particle is named because of its quantum field theory behavior. In this case NO particle was discovered but an excitation of a novel condensed matter state which behaves in an analogous way to a Majorana fermion. So in conclusion this very interesting discovery was both summarized and publicized in a misleading way.
A fermion that is its own antiparticle has never been observed in nature before.
There is one possible exception, the neutrino is a half spin fermion and if it really is zero mass it would be its own anti-particle. But recent evidence suggests a tiny but non-zero mass so if that's true it's not. Maybe one experiment would be to try to observe neutrino-antineutrino annihilation, if that occurs then they are Dirac fermions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majorana_fermion
There is one possible exception, the neutrino is a half spin fermion and if it really is zero mass it would be its own anti-particle.
Actually it's the other way around: massless Fermions are Dirac, because of Chiral symmetry: in the Standard Model with massless neutrinos, all neutrinos are Dirac particles, with neutrinos being left-handed and all antineutrinos being right-handed. Mass terms break chiral symmetry, and a massive neutrino could be either Dirac or majorana depending on how the mass term is generated:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_neutrino#Majorana_or_Dirac.3F
Sometimes it looks like there's twelve.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It hasn't "become" complex, it simply is, and uncovering its true nature and describing it is complex becuase we're essentially putting our hands in a black box, feeling around, and trying to describe what we feel in a logical way. Trying to describe something you can't directly observe is nessessarily going to have a complex way about it. You can describe the physics of a bouncing ball in a simple way, or you can describe it exactly using mathematical terms. Same with particle physics, bet we're trying to describe objects and phenomena that don't have good parrallels in the everyday world. But you can describe them in general terms as well, see Hawkings "A Brief History of Time".
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
"Scientists Find Long-Sought Majorana Particle" and they had all raided the vending machines down the hall and where found in their lab coats sitting cross legged in a circle each in turn sharing there own far-out theories of reality... "hey man don't Bogart that marjorana particle pass in on man".
The statement is perfectly true as written. Every particle has an antiparticle, not necessarily a distinct antiparticle, and its antiparticle has the opposite charge. (Hint: zero is its own opposite.)