Colloquium : Majorana fermions in nuclear, particle, and solid-state physics

Ettore Majorana (1906--1938) disappeared while traveling by ship from Palermo to Naples in 1938. His fate has never been fully resolved and several articles have been written that explore the mystery itself. His demise intrigues us still today because of his seminal work, published the previous year, that established symmetric solutions to the Dirac equation that describe a fermionic particle that is its own antiparticle. This work has long had a significant impact in neutrino physics, where this fundamental question regarding the particle remains unanswered. But the formalism he developed has found many uses as there are now a number of candidate spin-$1/2$ neutral particles that may be truly neutral with no…

• UD
  U.S. Department of Energy

  Award: DE-AC52-06NA25396
• CI
  Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
• CN
  Canadian Network for Research and Innovation in Machining Technology, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada