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The great families of fermions and bosons make up the majority of the particles in nature. There is a category of particles called Anyons. The emergence of anyons is predicted to occur inside materials small enough to confine the electronic state wave function.
Majorana zero mode is anAnyonic cousin to Majorana fermions proposed in 1937. Majoranas, as these hypothetical anyons are affectionately called, are predicted to exhibit a number of exotic properties, such as behaving like a particle and antiparticle, and being able to hide quantum information. The latter property has the promise of resilience.
Many groups have been looking for Majoranas. Majorana anyons are created inside hybrid materials, unlike fundamental particles, which can be found in a vacuum. The most promising platform for realizing them is based on hybrid superconductor-semiconductor. Over the past 10 years, these devices have been studied with the hope of proving the existence of Majoranas. Majoranas are easy to overlook or mistaken for other quantum states.
The mystery of Majorana physics has been further explored in a new paper. Two well-established techniques were applied to the same device. The states that are highly suggestive of Majoranas were not present when looking for them from different perspectives.
Similar to the following scenario, the observations are similar. You look through a door to a bar in search of Majorana. There is a concert going on. A rock star in a Majorana outfit is singing a song on the stage. There are a lot of Majorana fans at the bar. The fans rush to leave the bar when the door on the far end is opened. The real Majorana wouldn't do that.
Majoranas is special due to that. The Majorana anyon is pinned to one side of the device by virtue of a mathematical principle called topological protection, just like the true rock stars.
We wanted to know if there is a Majorana or not. The doors are tunnel barriers that send electrons in and out of the room. There are two doors, one drain and one source. The Majorana rock star imposter is seen from the two methods at the same time. These are superconductor quasi-particles, but not Majoranas.
The findings show that there are convincing Majorana imposters all over the place. They can be found in many different kinds of devices. The combination of two measurement strategies applied to the same device revealed the impostor. Majorana will eventually harness its power once this step is taken.
Marco Valentini et al., Majorana-like Coulomb spectroscopy in the absence of zero-bias peaks, was published in Nature.
Journal information: Nature
The Spanish National Research Council provided the information.
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