Angel Particle: All you need to know

After 80 years of quest, Scientist has found evidence of "Angel" particle, which is both matter and anti matter.In 1928, physicist Paul Dirac made the prediction that every fundamental particle in the universe has an antiparticle-that is its identical twin but with opposite charge, When particle and antiparticle met they would be annihilated, releasing energy.

After few years the first antimatter particle -electron's opposite, the Positron was discovered.However, in 1937, physicist Ettore Majorana predicted that in the class of particles known as fermions, which includes the proton, neutron, electron, neutrino, and quark, there should be particles that are their own antiparticles.

Scientists from the Stanford University and the University of California in the US have found the first firm evidence of such a Majorana fermion. They have named the Majorana fermion "angel particle," in reference to Dan Brown's best-selling thriller "Angels and Demons" in which a secret brotherhood plots to blow up the Vatican with a time bomb whose explosive power comes from matter-antimatter annihilation.

They have named the Majorana fermion "angel particle," in reference to Dan Brown's best-selling thriller "Angels and Demons" in which a secret brotherhood plots to blow up the Vatican with a time bomb whose explosive power comes from matter-antimatter annihilation. "This discovery concludes one of the most intensive searches in fundamental physics, which spanned exactly 80years," said Shoucheng Zhang, a professor at Stanford.

Although the search for the famous fermion seems more intellectual than practical, it could have real-life implications for building robust quantum computers, although this is admittedly far in the future, said Zhang, one of the senior authors of the study published in the journal Science. One particular type of Majorana fermion the research team observed is known as a "chiral" fermion because it moves along a one-dimensional path in just one direction.

Majorana fermions could be used to construct robust quantum computers that are not thrown off by environmental noise, which has been a big obstacle to their development. Since each Majorana is essentially half a subatomic particle, a single qubit of information could be stored in two widely separated Majorana fermions, decreasing the chance that something could perturb them both at once and make them lose the information they carry.