Majoranas particles found.
Majorana particles have been getting bad publicity: a claimed discovery in ultracold nanowires had to be retracted. Now Leiden physicists open up a new door to detecting Majoranas in a different experimental system, the Fu-Kane heterostructure, they announce in Physical Review Letters.
Majorana particles are quasiparticles: collective movements of particles (electrons in this case) which behave as single particles. If detected in real life, they could be used to build stable quantum computers.
“Majoranas are quantum mechanical superpositions,” explains Gal Lemut. This superposition, a special kind of combination, comprises an electron and a hole (a place in a crystal where an electron is missing.