An elusive particle that is its own antiparticle may have been
found, and, if confirmed, would be the first time a phenomenon
predicted decades ago has been seen in a real system. Some
researchers suggest that in the future, this mysterious particle
called a Majorana fermion could be useful in carrying bits of
information in quantum computers. In a paper published in the
journal Science Thursday, Vincent Mourik and Leo P. Kouwenhoven
said they were able to make the Majorana fermions appear by
exposing a small circuit to a magnetic field. Until now, the
only suggestion of the particle’s existence was a theory posed
by Italian physicist Ettore Majorana in 1937, who predicted the
Majorana fermion. While the evidence is strong, there are still
more experiments to do to confirm the finding. But that may be
fitting: Majorana himself was, by many accounts, a brilliant
physicist. But in 1938, he took a boat trip from Naples to
Palermo and disappeared. His body was never found, and the
circumstances of his disappearan