#majorana

Super–Kamiokande | Kamioka Observatory Chamber [Japan, 1996] University of Tokyo | Institute for Cosmic Ray Research [ICRR,1976]

Majorana

Portrait illustration for a AAAS Science article about the evasive Ettore Majorana (who disappeared without a trace in 1938) and his eponymous quasiparticle:

The Quantum Phantom – "A ghostly quasiparticle rooted in a century-old Italian mystery could unlock quantum computing’s potential—if only it could be pinned down."

Info, process & more:

P.S., from the article:

And 3 years ago, the researchers flew to UC Berkeley to visit the archive of Emilio Segrè, whose friendship with Majorana soured in the years before his disappearance. The researchers came across a folder that, per Segrè’s instructions, cannot be opened until the year 2057.

Ask Ethan: Do Neutrinos Always Travel At Nearly The Speed Of Light?

“I know neutrinos travel almost at the speed of light. But since they have mass, there is no reason that they couldn’t travel at any speed. But [you’ve implied] their mass dictates that they must travel almost at the speed of light.

But light travels at a constant speed. But anything with mass can travel at any speed.”

Neutrinos, because they have mass, can theoretically travel at any speed. Indeed, most of the neutrinos we have in the Universe are left over from the Big Bang itself, and those neutrinos must be moving at speeds that are slow compared to the speed of light. But we’ve never detected them, and we don’t know how to go about doing so. Instead, the only neutrinos we’ve seen come from processes that involve nuclear reactions, from stars, supernovae, stellar cataclysms, and nuclear reactors here on Earth, and those all produce high-energy neutrinos that move at speeds indistinguishable (by us) from the speed of light.

SNO+ | Sudbury Neutrino Observatory [Canada, 2025 | SNOLAB]

LEGEND–200 | Gran Sasso National Laboratory [Italy, 2023]

Break The Standard Model? An Ultra-Rare Decay Threatens To Do What The LHC Can't

“Just by sitting around with a bunch of unstable atoms, waiting for them to decay and measuring the decay products to incredible accuracy, we have the potential to finally break the Standard Model. Neutrinos are already the one type of particle known to go beyond the original Standard Model predictions, with potential ties to dark matter, dark energy, and baryogenesis in addition to their mass problem. Discovering that they undergo this bizarre, never-before-seen decay would make them their own antiparticles, and would introduce Majorana Fermions into the real world. If nature is kind to us, a box full of radioactive material might at last do what the LHC can't: shed light on some of the deepest, most fundamental mysteries about the nature of our Universe.”

Want to uncover the secrets to the Universe? Find out what particles and interactions there are beyond the Standard Model? The conventional approach is to take particles up to extremely high energies and smash them together, hoping that something new and exciting comes out. That’s a solid approach, but it has its limits. In particular, we haven’t seen anything new at the LHC other than the Higgs Boson, and might not even if we run it forever. But another, more subtle approach might yield heavy dividends: simply gathering a very large number of unstable atoms and looking for a special type of decay: neutrinoless double beta decay. If this decay actually occurs in nature, it would mean that neutrinos aren’t like the other particles we know of, but rather that neutrinos and antineutrinos are the same particles: Majorana particles!

The Majorana 2 chip sounds like a great advancement in quantum computing, or at least that is what Microsoft wants us to think.‘Wait until a non-Microsoft tech writes a peer-reviewed paper.’ Microsoft needs to prove the existence of Majorana states before we get our hopes up about breakthroughs in carbon capture materials, solid-state batteries, and self-healing polymers that require quantum…