A Purdue University physicist has observed evidence of long-sought Majorana fermions, special particles that could unleash the potential of fault-tolerant quantum computing.
Leonid Rokhinson, an associate professor of physics, led a team that is the first to successfully demonstrate the fractional a.c. Josephson effect, which is a signature of the particles.
"The search for this particle is for condensed-matter physicists what the Higgs boson search was for high-energy particle physicists," Rokhinson said. "It is a very peculiar object because it is a fermion yet it is its own antiparticle with zero mass and zero charge."
The pursuit of Majorana fermions is driven by their potential to encode quantum information in a way that solves a problem dogging quantum computing. The current carriers of quantum bits, the basic unit of information in quantum computing, are delicate and easily destroyed by small disturbances from the local environment. Information stored through Majorana fermions could be protected from such perturbances, resulting in a much more resilient quantum bit and 'fault-tolerant' quantum computing, he said.
"Information could be stored not in the individual particles, but in their relative configuration, so that if one particle is pushed a little by a local force, it doesn't matter," Rokhinson said. "As long as that local noise is not so strong that it alters the overall configuration of a group of particles, the information is retained. It offers an entirely new way of dealing with information."
To read more, click here.