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Majorana returns

Nature Physics volume 5, pages 614–618 (2009)Cite this article

In his short career, Ettore Majorana made several profound contributions. One of them, his concept of 'Majorana fermions' — particles that are their own antiparticle — is finding ever wider relevance in modern physics.

Enrico Fermi had to cajole his friend Ettore Majorana into publishing his big idea: a modification of the Dirac equation that would have profound ramifications for particle physics. Shortly afterwards, in 1938, Majorana mysteriously disappeared, and for 70 years his modified equation remained a rather obscure footnote in theoretical physics (Box 1). Now suddenly, it seems, Majorana's concept is ubiquitous, and his equation is central to recent work not only in neutrino physics, supersymmetry and dark matter, but also on some exotic states of ordinary matter.

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Figure 1: Antimatter matters in the solid state.

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  1. Frank Wilczek is at the Center for Theoretical Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA. wilczek@mit.edu,

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Wilczek, F. Majorana returns. Nature Phys 5, 614–618 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1380

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