Gathering Evidence to Prove Existence of Majorana Fermions

The experimental evidence for possible the existence of the theoretically proposed Majorana fermions (particles which are their own antiparticles) has created a buzz in the physics community. And, to give experts and non-experts insights into the latest in this field, ICTP invited Carlo Beenakker from Instituut-Lorentz Leiden University, The Netherlands, as the latest colloquium speaker on 21 August 2012.

Beenakker leads Leiden University's theoretical nanophysics group, and his work "addresses fundamental physical problems that occur when a macroscopic object is miniaturized to dimensions at the nanometer scale". Beenakker is also a speaker at the workshop on "Majorana Fermions, Non-Abelian Statistics and Topological Quantum Information Processing" being held at ICTP from 20 August to 24 August 2012.

In his talk, Beenakker spoke about how the topic of Majorana fermions shot into limelight after the April Science issue carried the article "Signatures of Majorana Fermions in hybrid superconductor-semiconductor nanowire devices", where authors provided possible experimental evidence of Majorana fermions in nanowires coupled to superconductors.

The potential use of Majorana fermions in quantum computing, whenever the concept is realised, is one among the many reasons for the excitement in the physics community. But, are the current experimental pointers sufficient? Beenakker explained how the community is still looking for the "smoking gun" evidence on Majorana fermions, and stressed that one of aims of the abovementioned workshop is indeed to review existing data while finding ways to gather more.