Friday, April 13, 2012

Not this again..

BBC science reporting is iffy. Here they report that Majorana particles have been detected in the lab. Majorana was an eccentric physicist who disappeared mysteriously. He proposed a theory (unprovable at the time and still not completely ruled out) that a neutrino was its own anti-particle. The most promising way I know of to test this is to look for nuclear double-beta (2 electrons come out at once) decays and see if the electron's energy curve has the proper behavior at the endpoint--and that is notoriously difficult to do because it relies on knowing fine details about nuclear structure.

This isn't the same thing at all. This is a collective phenomenon, where a kind of wave of electrons in a metal can move around and act like it annihilates other waves of the same kind. This is cool and all--they can emulate Majorana behavior--but it isn't really a discovery of a fundamental particle. Good work, but the story is misleading...

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