Physics: Physicists detect a particle that is its own antiparticle

Using a copper wire width of an atom only, physicists from Princeton University have managed to show a particle predicted in 1937, but had never been observed until now for sure: the particle Majorana (see red area in the zoomed portion of the image). Credits: Yazdani Lab, Princeton University

A particle that is also its own antiparticle? This is known Majorana particle. Predicted in 1937, it has first to be detected by physicists from Princeton University (USA).
Physicists detected for the first time the existence of a said Majorana particle. Majorana particle? Predicted in 1937 by the Italian physicist Ettore Majorana, a Majorana particle is both matter and antimatter ....

Let us briefly recall what antimatter. The particles of antimatter have the same mass as their equivalent material but carry an opposite charge. For example, the positron, positively charged, is the antiparticle of the electron, negatively charged. Particulate matter and antimatter are always produced together, as a pair. Yet around us is almost exclusively composed of matter, which suggests that during the evolution of the Universe, very large quantities of antimatter have been "lost" (read more about antimatter, read this article extension antimatter published on the CERN site)

In practice this means that the particle Majorana is electrically neutral, since combining opposite charges (the charge of the particle, and the burden of the antiparticle, opposite to that of the particle). 

That said, let the circumstances of the discovery of this particle Majorana. To detect the physicist Ali Yazdani (Princeton University, USA) and colleagues have created a superconducting copper wire (Superconductivity is a phenomenon in which a material transports electricity with zero electrical resistance) off of an atom only. And it is by observing the end of the wire using a scanning tunnelling microscope that they discovered there the presence of Majorana particle.

Obviously, this methodology was not chosen at random: in 2001, the physicist Alexei Kitaev had indeed predicted that a Majorana particle would be likely to appear at the end of a superconducting wire. Where the methodology chosen by the authors of the new work.

Note that the discovery of this particle could lead to applications in quantum computers. Contrary to the "classical" computers, one of the essential principles of quantum computers based on the idea that an information unit may be worth while both 0 and 1 (corresponding to a state that physicists called "quantum superpositition"), which is obviously not the case in the binary system used by our computers, where an information unit can not argue that either of the two values ​​0 and 1.

This work was published October 2, 2014 in the journal Science, entitled "Observation of Majorana fermions in atomic chains ferromagnetic superconductor was".