(facepalm) Another day, another "popularized" article that confuses condensed-matter quasiparticles with real particles...
Here's the press announcement in 2012 of the preceeding work done in Delft: http://www.tudelft.nl/en/current/latest-news/article/detail/.... And here's a link to the related paper on ArXiV: http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.2792.
I know a few of the people working on the experimental setup within the Kavli Institute. Insanely complex setup! As an aerospace engineer, most of it goes well over my head, but it's interesting nonetheless!
> As opposed to particles found in a vacuum, unattached to other matter, these Majoranas are what’s called “emergent particles.” They emerge from the collective properties of the surrounding matter and could not exist outside the superconductor
Sounds a lot like some of the magnetic monopole announcements. It is always more of a situation than an actual thing.
This article does demonstrate the principle that virtually every area of active research in material science, no matter how obscure, will one day have a Very Important Application in Quantum Computers. sigh
Both matter and antimatter? You mean like the photon and, iirc, all the other neutrally charged elementary particles?
New quasi-particle is Majorana. :b
Is this a marijuana joke?
It's an interesting result for solid-state physicists, but the title is very confusing to the layman. The finding is about quasi particles that have the same properties as a Majorana fermion (a Majorana bound state), due to how electrons behave in a superconductor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majorana_fermion#Majorana_boun...). They did not detect a Majorana fermion itself. This is satisfactorily explained in the article, but the title is sensationalist.