Artwork: Internet.
In the universe, every elementary particle has antiparticle, the particle has the same mass but carries the opposite charge. When a particle meets its antiparticle, both will cancel each other out.
But since 1937, Italian physicist Ettore Majorana has come up with the idea of particle and antiparticle. He suggested that in the fermion particle lines (matter particles) consisting of protons, electrons, neutrons, neutrinos and quarks there will be some particles that actually possess antiparticles inside. Researchers refer to such particles as Majorana County.
Italian physicist Ettore Majorana.
To demonstrate the existence of Majorana County, the team attached two thin films made of two quantum materials stacked on top of each other, then passed an electric current through the vacuum environment.
As a result, one of the two plates is a superconducting material, the other is a superconducting topological insulator (topological is the form of space where the properties of matter are preserved through distortions).
This insulating plate allows electrons to move quickly along the edge of the material surface without running through the center.
Next, they sprayed a small amount of magnetic material, the flow of electrons flowed in one direction along this side and in the opposite direction at the other. Researchers scanned magnets through materials, causing all electrons to move slowly, eventually stopping and reversing. At this point, the pseudobulbs begin to appear in pairs from the material and move in the same direction as the electron.
The researchers found something special here, when stopping and reversing, pseudo-displacement particles on the path equal to half of the electron. This proves that each pseudocode is only half of the grain. This is evidence of the existence of Majorana County.
The new particle is named "angelic particle", inspired by a bomb that combines material and antimatter in Dan Brown's famous novel Angel and Devil.
Professor Shoucheng Zhang, head of the research team, said that Majorana county has many applications in the field of manufacturing super-fast-speed quantum computers in the distant future.
In fact, Professor Zhang's team only found basic signs of irritating matter, acting like Majorana seeds and not actually seeing angelic particles. They have not been able to determine if angelic particles exist in nature.
But based on the signs obtained in this experiment, researchers can accurately predict where Majorana county can be found. At the same time, this finding also confirms one of the fundamental theories that have lasted 80 years of physics.
The results of this new particle study are published in the journal Science.