This is the third book in the series that included 'The Theory of Nothing' the "The Universe Revealed.' My purpose in this new book is to more fully explain how science is actually done and how science fits into our culture along with religion and p...
This sounds like some sort of religious concept, but it's actually one of the most interesting discoveries in quantum physics. I must admit that I didn't know about this until just recently.
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An Italian physicist by the name of Ettore Majorana theorized in 1937 that chiral fermions, a new class of particles, could exist. He based this on Paul Dirac's 1928 theory that every matter particle has an evil twin anti-matter particle, which has been proven to be the case. However, Majorana's particle was especially devious because it could be both a matter particle and an antimatter particle at the same time. This idea was made famous in Dan Brown's novel 'Angels and Demons'.
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The main characteristic of angel particles is that when they are smashed together, they annihilate each other in an enormous blast of energy. A rocket engine based on antimatter-matter annihilation would make space travel in excess of light speed possible.
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Well, as it turns out, Majoranas's angel particle's existence was verified in recent experiments at Stanford University by Shoucheng Zhang. What was needed was a way to detect these newly discovered particles, and that's where it gets very complicated.
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What Zhang had to do was build a racetrack for electrons. He laid a magnetic topological insulator on top of a semiconductor. This allowed electrons to speed around without impediment. By modifying the insulator with a small amounts of magnetic material, he now could force the electrons to only go in one direction, sort of like racecars on a track. When he swept a magnet across his electron racetrack, Zhang was able to cause the electrons to stop and reverse direction in typical jerky quantum steps that were predictable. This trick caused the electrons to take on the angel particle characteristic because of a quantum mechanical effect predicted by Majorana. The way that these new particles could be detected is because with each reversal step a pair was kicked off the track, so to speak. Even though the electrons looked normal, they appeared twice as often as expected and only moved in one dimension, indicating that it had taken on the matter and antimatter persona of Majorana's angel particle.
What's the significance of this, you ask?
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Well, it turns out that these jerky quantum steps would work just perfectly in a quantum computer. Theory says that one could build a quantum computer using angel particles that would be 100 million times faster than today's computers. How cool is that!
