Elementary particles with unusual properties - Majorana fermions were first discovered on the surface of gold

A scientific group from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued a statement that for the first time in history they managed to record on the surface of gold there are unique elementary particles that are at the same time their own antiparticles - Majorana fermions.

Scientists reported on their unique discovery on the pages of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This discovery can find the most active application in the creation of objects such as quantum computers.

What are these particles

You are probably asking: "What are these particles?"

So these unique particles got their name in honor of the physicist with the Italian passport E. Majorana, who performed the theoretical substantiation of the existence of these particles.

But in practice, despite the fact that they fit perfectly into many theories, they could not be detected.

Only in 2017, a scientific team of Chinese and American scientists using an extremely complex niobium circuit superconductor and topological insulator of antimony, bismuth and chromium telluride, it turned out to fix these particles.

But in a new study, American scientists have applied a much simpler scheme of gold nano threads with insignificant inclusions of ferromagnet (europium sulfide) and especially conductive vanadium substrate.

So, performing a thorough scan of the resulting surface using tunneling microscopy, the engineers recorded peaks of signals, which, according to theoretical calculations, are generated only by pairs of Majorana fermions.

Why is this discovery so important?

As D. Mudera, Majorana fermions are exotic particles that scientists around the world have long wanted to see. And the opportunity to capture them in such a simple and common material as gold is just luck.

The scientific group has set itself to find a practical realization of fermions and is already working to put into practice the theoretical calculations of Aleksey Kitaev. He calculated that fermions could be used to build stable qubits in quantum computers.

This direction is promising, since the discovered phenomenon will make it possible to create scalable systems in which there can be hundreds of millions of qubits. The technology is also quite cheap and affordable.

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