Physicists Observe the Majorana Fermion, Which Is Its Own Antiparticle

Charliemopps writes: "For the first time Princeton University scientists have observed a Majorana fermion, a long-predicted but never observed exotic particle that acts as both matter and anti-matter (abstract). "The setup they created starts with an ultrapure crystal of lead, whose atoms naturally line up in alternating rows that leave atomically thin ridges on the crystal's surface. The researchers then deposited pure iron into one of these ridges to create a wire that is just one atom wide and about three atoms thick. ...[Next, they] placed the lead and the embedded iron wire under the scanning-tunneling microscope and cooled the system to -272 degrees Celsius, just a degree above absolute zero. After about two years of painstaking work, they confirmed that superconductivity in the iron wire matched the conditions required for Majorana fermion to be created in their material." The particle is surprisingly stable. Being in both states at once seems to make it interact very weakly with its surrounding material. This could also be a major step towards quantum computing.

Comments

The summary is missleading

[angel'o'sphere]

Perhaps it would have been much easier and much more accurate to copy/paste simply the original MIT abstract of the article.

The 'discovered' Majorana Fermion is a quasiparticle, created at the boundary edges of two superconductors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q...

In this case iron and lead, so there is actually no 'new particle' discovered but more or less only a 'quantum point' created by weird behaving electrons ...

And this all together is light years away from anything useful regarding quantum computing (IMHO :) )