News: Scientists racing to build practical quantum computers are exploring particles like Majorana particles that are their own antiparticles to store and manipulate information.
About Majorana Particles
- It is a fermion that is its own antiparticle.
- Fermions are fundamental particles, or elementary particles, which means that they have no constituent particles.
- Discovered by: They were hypothesized by Ettore Majorana in 1937.
- Unlike electrons or protons, which annihilate with their antimatter counterparts, Majoranas are perfectly symmetric.
- The term is sometimes used in opposition to Dirac fermion, which describes fermions that are not their own antiparticles.
- Specific Features
- Self-symmetry: A Majorana is a perfect mirror of itself, unlike electrons or protons.
- Quasiparticle realizations: In specially designed materials, Majorana-like modes may emerge at the ends of tiny superconducting wires cooled near absolute zero under a magnetic field.
- Nonlocal encoding: Two separated Majorana modes jointly define one qubit.
- A local disturbance to one cannot by itself erase the encoded information.
- Application
- Stabilizing qubits: Nonlocal encoding offers a first line of defence against decoherence in quantum computers.
- Topological computation: Logical operations can be implemented by braiding Majorana modes, with robustness set by braid topology.
- Efficiency gains: The approach aims to protect qubits at the hardware level and reduce heavy quantum error-correction overhead compared with today’s platforms.
