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A recent article in phys.org details PhD candidate Sasa Gazibegovic's thesis and her discovery that hashtags made of superconducting nano wires can produce stable, entangled pairs of majorana fermions.
For those who don't already know, Fermions are the group of particles which follow Fermi–Dirac statistics. These particles obey the Pauli exclusion principle. Fermions include all quarks and leptons, as well as all composite particles made of an odd number of these, such as all baryons and many atoms and nuclei. Fermions differ from bosons, which obey Bose–Einstein statistics.
A fermion can be an elementary particle, such as the electron, or it can be a composite particle, such as the proton. According to the spin-statistics theorem in any reasonable relativistic quantum field theory, particles with integer spin are bosons, while particles with half-integer spin are fermions.
Majorana fermions are fermions which are their own anti-particle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majorana_fermion
It is important to note that majorana fermions don't really exist in the same sense an electron or a photon exists. They are quasi-particle excitations, meaning that they are the result of getting several particles to act as one.
With majorana fermions you assign a single wave function to a group of particles that then act as a cohesive whole.
Where she has innovated here is by entangling pairs of majorana fermions by passing them along the hashtag shaped nano-wire and back, effectively braiding their wave functions together.
This is an amazing result and very exciting.
The long haul problem on general purpose quantum computers is that qubits and quantum logic gates are remarkably unstable. Once produced, marjorana fermion pairs have the property of being extremely stable without any extraordinary steps like noise elimination and cryogenics.
The process she details is entirely solid state and could be achieved by any reasonably recent fab.
Thus by using Ms. Gazibegovic's process, we may soon be able to construct general purpose quantum computers that are as accessible as modern solid state computers. Now if someone can just come up with a good programming language for it.
More good reading here..
https://phys.org/news/2019-05-years-closer-mistery-majorana-particles.html
Truthfully when I read this article I thought it was crackpot. A solid state process for producing stable qubits at room temperature? It violates a lot of what I thought I knew. But I researched it, this is legit and the author is well published and cited in her field.
https://www.tue.nl/en/our-university/departments/applied-physics/the-department/staff/detail/ep/e/d/ep-uid/20159542/ep-tab/4/
My instincts tell me this discovery / invention will end up being as transformative to quantum computing as the transistor was to classical computing.
(Score: 2) by sshelton76 on Sunday May 12 2019, @09:11PM (2 children)
Yeah I clickbaited that headline based on an image in the linked article. I needed something interesting and it was hard coming up with something given the source material.
Still, this is a really cool result and if it pans out, we may be sitting on the cusp of a revolution that will make the modern transistor look as primitive as vacuum tubes and relays.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 12 2019, @10:26PM (1 child)
A hashtag is so named because it is a combination of a hash character (#) and a textual tag.
If you wanted to make clickbait out of it, you should've made a weed reference.
(Score: 1) by Rupert Pupnick on Sunday May 12 2019, @11:04PM
How about this: I think hashtags and marijuana fermions are just the breakthrough we’ve all been waiting for!