Scientists have long accepted that every particle that exists has its own antiparticle that can smash it out of existence. But in 1937, the physicist Ettore Majorana posited an even stranger idea: According to the known laws of physics, there should exist particles that eliminate themselves. These supposed self-annihilators remained hypothetical for the next 80 years.
But a recent discovery from Stanford University has changed all that.
On Friday, a team of physicists created the first-ever “angel particle” — a chiral Majorana fermion, which represents both matter and antimatter at the same time. While there have been experiments in the past that have detected what could be Majorana neutrinos in a lab, it wasn’t until this latest result, published Friday in Science, that scientists had any true experimental confirmation of their existence.
According to Majorana’s theory — developed nine years after the physicist Paul Dirac, in 1928, experimentally verified the claim that every particle has its own neutralizing antiparticle — smashing “angel particles” into one another will cause both to annihilate in a hot flash of energy. In theory, an antimatter engine would be one of the most powerful energy sources in the universe because of the immense energy that self-annihilation would release.
To read more, click here.