The video shows how the researchers first deposited iron atoms onto a lead surface to create an atomically thin wire.
This aloofness has spurred scientists to search for ways to engineer the Majorana into materials, which could provide a much more stable way of encoding quantum information, and thus a new basis for quantum computing. However, quantum computing requires exceptional control over the environment with which the quantum states of interest interact, and this is extremely difficult to achieve.ĭespite combining matter and antimatter, which usually leads to self-annihilation, Majorana fermions are remarkably stable quantum states that interact extremely weakly with their environment. This strange property, called quantum superposition, offers the possibility of solving some problems previously thought to be impossibly difficult. In quantum computing, electrons are coaxed into representing not only the ones and zeroes of conventional computers but also a strange quantum state that is both a one and a zero. In addition to its implications for fundamental physics, the finding offers scientists a potentially major advance in the pursuit of quantum computing. Although many forms of antimatter have since been observed, the Majorana has remained elusive. In 1937, Italian physicist Ettore Majorana predicted that a single, stable particle could be simultaneously matter and antimatter.
The hunt for the Majorana fermion began in the earliest days of quantum theory shortly after physicists first realized that their equations implied the existence of "antimatter" counterparts to commonly known particles such as the electron. Using a two-story-tall scanning-tunneling microscope, the scientists captured a glowing image of a particle known as a "Majorana fermion" perched at the end of an atomically thin magnetic wire. Scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and Princeton University have observed an exotic particle that behaves simultaneously like matter and antimatter, a breakthrough that could eventually enable powerful computers based on quantum mechanics.
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