Colloquium : Majorana fermions in nuclear, particle, and solid-state physics
By S. Elliott, M. Franz. 2014
629 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Ettore Majorana (1906-1938) disappeared while traveling by ship from Palermo to Naples in 1938. His fate has never been fully resolved and several articles have been written that explore the mystery itself. His demise intrigues us still today because of his seminal work, published the previous year, that established symmetric solutions to the Dirac equation that describe a fermionic particle that is its own anti-particle. This work has long had a significant impact in neutrino physics, where this fundamental question regarding the particle remains unanswered. But the formalism he developed has found many uses as there are now a number of candidate spin-1/2 neutral particles that may be truly neutral with no quantum number to distinguish them from their anti-particles. If such particles exist, they will influence many areas of nuclear and particle physics. Most notably the process of neutrinoless double beta decay can only exist if neutrinos are massive Majorana particles. Hence, many efforts to search for this process are underway. Majorana's influence doesn't stop with particle physics, however, even though that was his original consideration. The equations he derived also arise in solid state physics where they describe electronic states in materials with superconducting order. Of special interest here is the class of solutions of the Majorana equation in one and two spatial dimensions at exactly zero energy. These Majorana zero modes are endowed with some remarkable physical properties that may lead to advances in quantum computing and, in fact, there is evidence that they have been experimentally observed. This review first summarizes the basics of Majorana's theory and its implications. It then provides an overview of the rich experimental programs trying to find a fermion that is its own anti-particle in nuclear, particle, and solid state physics.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1d1064d3dfab5b9b49809079ed037b92efaf9289
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
In Condensed Matter Physics
In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Colloquium : Topological band theory (2016, background): “…Kim, Brahlek, et al. 2011; Vargas et al. 2014) and various exotic quantum phenomena possible in the TIs (e.g., Majorana fermions (Fu and Kane 2008; Elliott and Franz 2015; Roy and Kallin 2008; Kitaev 2009; Schnyder et al. 2008), axions,(Essin, Moore, and Vanderbilt 2009; Li et al. 2010) magnetic…”
- Quantum anomalous Hall effect and related topological electronic states (2015, background): “impler electronic structure, easier synthesis and less extreme growth conditions is necessary. The QAHE and Chern insulators can be also helpful for the possible realization of Majorana fermions (MF) [224], which are exotic charge-neutral particles that are their own antiparticles. In recent years, ”
- Weyl and Dirac semimetals in three-dimensional solids (2017, methodology): “In 1937, Ettore Majorana found a modification using real numbers, which described a neutral particle that was its own anti-particle (Elliott and Franz, 2015; Majorana, 1937).”
- Effects of Gate-Induced Electric Fields on Semiconductor Majorana Nanowires (2018, background): “[5] Steven R Elliott and Marcel Franz, “Colloquium : Majorana fermions in nuclear, particle, and solid-state physics,” Rev Mod Phys 87, 137–163 (2015).”