July 17, 2015 | by Jonathan O'Callaghan
IFLSCIENCE.COM
Two separate teams of researchers have found evidence
for a theorized type of massless particle known as a “Weyl
fermion.” The discovery was made by scientists at Princeton University
in New Jersey and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and could
herald a whole new age of better electronics.
Weyl fermions were first hypothesized by German mathematician and
physicist Hermann Weyl in 1929. They were proposed as being among the
building blocks of subatomic particles, and were also said to be unique
in that they would have no mass and also behave as both matter and
antimatter – which has the same mass but opposite charge and other
properties to regular matter – inside a crystal.
Initially, they were wrongly identified as neutrinos, until it was
found in 1998 that neutrinos have a very small amount of mass. Now the
researchers say they have solved the 85-year-old mystery for good. The
research by both teams was published in the journal Science.
They found the fermions independently by firing photons at crystals
of a semi-metal called tantalum arsenide, which has properties between
an insulator and a conductor. They cannot exist by themselves as
standalone particles, but instead exist as quasiparticles – a
"disturbance" in a medium that behaves like a particle. “In other
words, they are electronic activity that behaves as if they were
particles in free space,” IEEE explains.
Source: http://www.iflscience.com/physics/discovery-massless-weyl-fermion-particle-could-revolutionize-electronics
