A Purdue University physicist has observed evidence of
long-sought Majorana fermions, special particles that could unleash the
potential of fault-tolerant quantum computing.
Leonid Rokhinson, an associate professor of physics, led a
team that is the first to successfully demonstrate the fractional a.c.
Josephson effect, which is a signature of the particles.
"The search for this particle is for condensed-matter
physicists what the Higgs boson search was for high-energy particle physicists,"
Rokhinson said. "It is a very peculiar object because it is a fermion yet
it is its own antiparticle with zero mass and zero charge."