Majorana Fermion May Have Been Spotted At TU Delft 73
vikingpower writes "A research group at Technical University Delft around prof. Kouwenhoven has probably not only spotted pairs of so-called Majorana Fermions for the first time (these had been predicted to exist by the Italian physicist Ettore Majorana), but also demonstrated that, by generating them at the end of an Indium-Arsenide microwire, quantum computing with them may have come one more step closer to reality. The excitement around Prof. Kouwenhoven at the American Physical Society annual congress in Boston, after he completed his presentation, was considerable.A nice illustration is provided by this newspaper article (in Dutch)."
[a,a+]=1 (Score:4, Interesting)
OK, Majorana Fermion is a particle for which a=a+
But by definition the second quantization operators [a,a+]=(aa+)-(a+a)=1
So we have a contradiction here, because if a=a+, then [a,a+]=0, which does not obey to the definition of second quantization operator.
Someone cares to enlighten me?
How do those Majorana a and a+ operators look in positional representation? How does the first wave function look like?
I'll try later to find original Majorana papers, but in meantime if you have some hints I'd be glad to hear.