Can a single entity be matter and antimatter at the same time? It looks like it
Oh, matter is matter and antimatter is antimatter, and never the twain shall meet. That line has a poetic ring of truth about it - perhaps more so than Rudyard Kipling's original about east and west. After all, if matter and antimatter do meet, their mutual destruction is assured as they "annihilate" in a flash of light.
Or do they? Almost as soon as antimatter burst onto the scene 80 years ago, another possibility was aired: that certain particles, dubbed Majorana particles after their proposer, might be matter and antimatter at the same time. Proving this would be a big deal. It could help us to pin down the identity of the dark matter thought to dominate the cosmos, and discriminate between candidates for a better, all-encompassing theory of how stuff works. It might even explain the greatest material mystery: why matter exists at all.
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