Weyl fermion discovery named Top Ten Breakthrough of 2015 by Physics World

Princeton University Professor of Physics M. Zahid Hasan is one of three physicists whose efforts to observe Weyl fermions, an elusive massless particle theorized 85 years ago, have been named among the Top Ten Breakthroughs of 2015 by Physics World magazine. Hasan shares the honor with Marin Soljacic, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and with Zhong Fang and Hongming Weng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, whose research teams independently found evidence of the fermion.

Proposed by the mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl in 1929, Weyl fermions have long been regarded as possible building blocks of other subatomic particles. If applied to next-generation electronics, the fermions could allow for a nearly free and efficient flow of electricity and thus greater power.