Nanoscience pioneer Leo Kouwenhoven and his group at Delft may have detected Majorana fermions, mysterious quantum-mechanical particles that may have applications in quantum computing.

Multiple schemes have been proposed in which Majorana fermions act as the “bits” in quantum computers,

Quantum particles come in two types, fermions and bosons. Whereas bosons can be their own antiparticles, which means that they can annihilate each other in a flash of energy, fermions generally have distinct antiparticles; for example, an electron’s antiparticle is the positively charged positron.

In 1937 Italian physicist Ettore Majorana adapted equations that Englishman Paul Dirac had used to describe the behavior of fermions and bosons to predict the existence of a type of fermions that was its own antiparticle.

Over decades, particle physicists tried to observe Majorana fermions in nature and after 2008 condensed matter physicists began to think of ways in which they could be formed from the collective behavior of  electrons in solid state materials, specifically on surfaces placed in contact with superconductors or in one-dimensional wires.

Harvard physicist Jay Sau, who attended Kouwenhoven’s talk at the American Physical Society’s March meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, says that this is the most promising-looking experiment yet. “It would be hard to argue that it’s not Majorana fermions,” he says.

If the Delft group’s result holds up, it not only scores an impressive coup within solid state physics, but does so ahead of other approaches to creating Majorana fermions. For example, the neutralino, a hypothetical supersymmetric particle that could account for some or all of the Universe’s dark matter, is thought to be a Majorana fermion. Some models suggest that neutralinos could be produced by the Large Hardron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.