First sighting of Majorana fermion on a common metal | Hacker News Reader

First sighting of Majorana fermion on a common metal

phys.org

73 pointslelf11 comments

The big problem in this field is actually proving you have a majorana fermion. In this experiment they measured a zero bias conductance peak, but this can de caused by multiple other things as well. There are other detection methods as well, but the ultimate prove is using two majorana's and "braid" them together, thus forming a qubit. Doing this is much harder, but is also the primary use case for majorana's, so it is necessary anyway. Until someone does this with this system I would take this measurement as a strong indicator, but not a real breakthrough.

> Now the MIT-led team has observed evidence of Majorana fermions in a material system they designed and fabricated, which consists of nanowires of gold grown atop a superconducting material, vanadium, and dotted with small, ferromagnetic "islands" of europium sulfide.

Material science is dope

> nanowires of gold grown atop a superconducting material, vanadium, and dotted with small, ferromagnetic "islands" of europium sulfide

It's about effing time _they_ finally got their dizzy asses around to trying this, eh? I've been so frustrated over the past few decades urging this approach!

It’s probably a funding and general engineering problem.

I imagine they're hard to find because they annihilate each other. But they probably have a nonlinear surface area function which is dependent at the very least on interacting particle energies, so there's Hope for controlling them if that's the case.

Came here to say something like this. One big problem in the field is detection. They are detected only indirectly using current methods. And there are other particles that could trigger a detection. Majorana particles have interesting properties in theory, but these properties have yet to be validated. The most interesting, and useful for quantum computing, is the ability for a pair of Majorana Fermions to "record", in the form of a qubit, how many times they have been wrapped around each other. But this requires having two, and being able to move them at will. Every new material we find them in is a chance for success.

The article briefly touches on it, but could someone explain why Majorana particles are ideal for quantum computing?

The Wikipedia article has a short paragraph on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Majorana_fermion&...

Thanks. I read it and I guess the answer to my question is above my pay grade...

Qubits are susceptible to all kinds of environmental noise. That's why current designs are cooled to cryogenic temperatures. Certain kinds of Majorana particles solve this problem by making the qubit distributed. In a handwaving way, the 1 state of the qubit is on one end of a wire, and the zero state is on the other; really there is a Majorana particle on each end of the wire, and by manipulating them you can control the state of the qubit. To manipulate the qubit you must interact with both ends of the wire at the same time. That goes for noise as well. And noise typically acts locally, not in two places at the same time, so the qubit is protected.

Very cool. Thank you for that! Is there an easy way to explain why you can't do this with other particles but you can with Majorana particles?

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