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Researchers at Microsoft say they have created elusive quasiparticles called Majorana zero modes – but scientists outside the company are sceptical Microsoft researchers have made a controversial claim that they have seen evidence of an elusive particle that could solve some of the biggest headaches in quantum computing, but some experts are questioning the discovery. Quantum computers process information using quantum bits, or qubits, but current iterations can be prone to error. “What the field needs is a new kind of qubit,” says Chetan Nayak at Microsoft Quantum. He and his colleagues say they have taken a significant step...

It has long been known that there are two types of excitation for electrons, as in addition to their charge they have a property called spin. Spin and charge excitations travel at fixed, but different speeds...However, theorists are unable to calculate what precisely happens beyond only small perturbations, as the interactions are too complex. The Cambridge team has measured these speeds as their energies are varied, and find that a very simple picture emerges...Each type of excitation can have low or high kinetic energy... with the well-known formula E=1/2 mv2, which is a parabola. But for spin and charge the...

Cuprous oxide crystal. (University of St Andrews) One of the ways we can fully realize the potential of quantum computers is by basing them on both light and matter – this way, information can be stored and processed, but also travel at the speed of light. Scientists have just taken a step closer to this goal, by successfully producing the largest hybrid particles of light and matter ever created. These quasiparticles, known as Rydberg polaritons, were made with the help of a piece of stone containing cuprous oxide (Cu2O) crystals from an ancient deposit in Namibia, one of the few...

A small team of researchers at Purdue University has found the strongest evidence yet of the existence of abelian anyons. They have written a paper describing experiments they conducted designed to reveal the existence of the quasiparticles and have uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server while they await peer review. Anyons are neither bosons nor fermions—in fact, they are not elementary particles at all. Instead, they are classified as quasiparticles that exist in two dimensions. They can be observed, theoretically speaking, when they appear as disturbances in two-dimensional sheets of materials. Theoretical physicists have suggested their existence since the...

There are ghostly shapes hidden in magnetic fields. They're not made of stuff in the way a lightning bolt or a beam of light is. A lighting bolt carries a fairly defined group of electrons from the sky all the way to the ground.... But magnetic fields contain things called skyrmions that are different from electrons and photons; a skyrmion is a knot of magnetic field lines looping around each other. As it drifts from one spot to the next, a skyrmion makes itself anew out of the magnetic field lines that are already there. The knot holds together because...

For the First Time, Electrons are Observed Splitting into Smaller Quasi-Particles   We generally think of electrons as fundamental building blocks of atoms, elementary subatomic particles with no smaller components to speak of. But according to Swiss and German researchers reporting in Nature this week, we are wrong to think so. For the first time, the researchers have recorded an observation of an electron splitting into two different quasi-particles, each taking different characteristics of the original electron with it. Using samples of the copper-oxide compound Sr2CuO3, the researchers lifted some of the electrons belonging to the copper atoms out of...