If you don't know about Majorana Fermion, here's a short explanation. Majorana Fermions are particles which are regarded as their own antiparticle. They were hypothesized by Ettore Majorana in 1937. But, here is a cool news. Can you guess?
Physicist at MIT have observed evidence of Majorana fermion on the surface of common gold. This is the very first sighting of Majorana on any surface and it can be potentially scaled up. The results that are published in Proceedings of National academy of Science can be a major step toward isolating these particles stably to be used a error-proof qubits for Quantum Computing.
How they find it?
When the researchers scanned the surface near the islands, they saw signature signal spikes near zero energy on the very top surface of gold. And according to a theory this should only be generated by pairs of Majorana fermions.
Jagadeesh Moodera said that Majorana is a very special long dream that has finally come true and we have seen it. They are there, and stable, and easily scalable. Moodera is a senior research scientist at MIT.
The Qubits Things
Patrick Lee added to his words that the next push will be to take these objects and make them into qubits, which would be huge progress toward practical quantum computing.
Majorana fermions would be ideal as Qubits. The science behind the development is that a qubit would be made of combinations of pairs of Majorana fermions, each of which would be separated from its partner. So, if any kind of noise errors affects one of the member of the pair, the other should remain unaffected. And this will preserve the integrity of the qubit and enabling it to correctly carry out a computation.
The End Notes
The research is funded by the John Templeton Foundation, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy. There are still many unknowns about Majorana fermions and researchers are doing risky job in finding solutions. Converting Majorana fermions into a qubit is also a difficult task. Well, in future technology might help in developing smarter technology. Well, there is much more to discover. I hope you also Discover Big.
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