This is a good article also.
The Army Wants to Use a Theoretical Particle To Make an Unhackable Quantum Computer
A telltale signature of the theoretical particle was discovered last year. Now the Army wants to use it to build a quantum computer.
Last July, a group of researchers from UC Irvine, UCLA, and Stanford announced they’d found the first strong evidence of the Majorana fermion, an elusive particle first theorised over 80 years ago that acts as its own antiparticle. The evidence of the Majorana fermion was hailed as a major “landmark” in physics, but it didn’t take long for the US Army, which funded the research, to begin considering wartime applications for the particle.
As detailed in an Army statementreleased Monday, the US military is considering how to deploy the Majorana fermion as a robust defense against cyber attacks and a key component of the quantum computers it hopes will soon be used to analyze military data. The military is placing its bets on the Majorana particle to be the basis of a virtually unhackable quantum computer because it will be able to store data without succumbing to electromagnetic interference. Moreover, any intruder in a quantum system controlled by the Army would be unable to access the system’s data without corrupting it and alerting the Army to the intrusion.
First theorized by the Italian physicist Ettore Majorana in 1937, the Majorana fermion has zero electrical charge. For decades, evidence of the particle’s existence eluded physicists and most considered the neutrino to be the leading candidate for the Majorana fermion. A few years ago, however, the group of California researchers hypothesized that Majorana particles might be created by manipulating exotic materials like superconductors, which conduct electricity with 100 percent efficiency.
As detailed in a paper published last July in Science, the researchers were looking for Majorana quasiparticles, which arise from the collective behavior of particles in a physical medium and exhibit some properties of particles—such as momentum—without actually being a particle. A way to think about this is like bubbles in a glass of beer, which aren’t really independent things, but the result of the displacement of the beer by carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, the bubbles retain certain observable characteristics as they rise.
The researchers found evidence of the Majorana quasiparticles when they stacked two thin films of superconducting materials on top of one another, placed them in a vacuum chamber, and applied electricity to the films, which caused electrons to glide along the edges of the superconductors. When the researchers applied a magnet to the films, the electrons would stop and switch directions, but this also caused pairs of Majorana quasiparticles to emerge in pairs. Although they exhibited the same behavior as the electrons insofar as they would stop and reverse directions along the superconducting films, they did so at half the rate of the electrons, which was the telltale sign that they were Majorana quasiparticles
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