Ettore Majorana was an Italian physicist born on Aug. 5, 1906, in Catania, Sicily, who studied in Rome and worked with Enrico Fermi’s team to boost the development of nuclear physics in the third decade of the last century. Unfortunately, he disappeared on Mar. 25, 1938, under circumstances that have never been clarified. In 1937, he postulated the existence of unusual and bizarre eponymous particles, also dubbed Majorana fermions (MFs).
While the search for such particles is still a big task for experimentalists, a similar behavior can be found in a new class of particles that can open a new prospect in quantum computing. The so-called “quasi-particles” have suggested a method to build qubits that are topologically protected—that is, intrinsically resilient against disturbances that alter their quantum state and are therefore well-suited to build more reliable quantum computers (QCs). A QC operates from qubits that, unlike bits of traditional computers, can handle 0s and 1s simultaneously by leveraging the superposition of both. Superposition, together with entanglement and interference, are the basic quantum phenomena allowing operation of QCs.
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