Posted on 04/17/2012 12:16:44 PM PDT by presidio9
An elusive particle that is its own antiparticle may have been found, and, if confirmed, would be the first time a phenomenon predicted decades ago has been seen in a real system.
Some researchers suggest that in the future, this mysterious particle called a Majorana fermion could be useful in carrying bits of information in quantum computers.
In a paper published in the journal Science Thursday, Vincent Mourikand Leo P. Kouwenhoven said they were able to make the Majorana fermions appear by exposing a small circuit to a magnetic field.
Until now, the only suggestion of the particle's existence was a theory posed by Italian physicist Ettore Majorana in 1937, who predicted the Majorana fermion. [Infographic: Nature's Tiniest Particles Dissected]
While the evidence is strong, there are still more experiments to do to confirm the finding. But that may be fitting: Majorana himself was, by many accounts, a brilliant physicist. (He was the first to propose a theoretical basis for the existence of neutrons.) But in 1938, he took a boat trip from Naples to Palermo and disappeared. His body was never found, and the circumstances of his disappearance have remained mysterious.
Wacky particles
Elementary particles come in two types: fermions and bosons. Fermions are particles such as electrons, leptons and quarks (which themselves make up protons and neutrons). Fermions make up matter and obey the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which says two particles can't be in the same quatum state at the same time. (This is why two protons or neutrons, for instance, can't be in the same place at once). Bosons are things such as photons and W particles, which carry forces.
Majorana fermions are so special because they are different from other fermions,
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I’m all for legalizing medical Majorana....
I am against antiparticle!
Now we need to use the anti-matter in cold fusion reaction of HE3. If the reaction can be controlled in a certain magnetic field, gravity can be negated.
We could fly around in invisible bubbles with little nuclear powered canisters strapped to our backs.
(This is only hypothetical)
Fighting the disestablishment of the antiparticle are ya? This is antidisestablishmentarianism.
(I'm trying to re-establish the use of the word here)
Wrong - charged bosons, such as the electroweak boson W+, are not their own antiparticles. And even the Z0 boson, which is its own antiparticle, annihilates.
I wondered where I left it.
Why buy fermions retail when you can get the same effects from free fakes!
What about Bo’sun Smee? Was he his own anti-particle? Or was he his own grandpa? I can’t remember which....
Fermion's not here, man.
I love articles like this, revealing new discoveries.
It is my take though, that when we start seeing these types of discoveries break from China, it will be a real indication of danger ahead.
This is not a discovery as normally understood, but a creation or invention. An abstract definition of particle is “an excited state of a system”. Elementary particles may be said to be “excited states of the vacuum”, and this marjorana thing is not that, as far as I understand the description. It’s more like a Cooper pair of electrons, which acts as a boson in BCS superconducting theory.
What? It could work.
Lol
“- charged bosons, such as the electroweak boson W+”
I always appreciate a nice pair of bosons.
- Enrico Fermi, Physicist by Emilio Segrè
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