The 2017 discovery of a particular kind of Majorana fermion, the chiral Majorana fermion, referred to as the angel particle, is likely a false alarm, according to new research conducted by a team of physicists at Penn State and the University of Wurzburg in Germany. They found that the feature that was claimed to be the manifestation of the angel particle was unlikely to be induced by the existence of the angel particle.
An important first step toward a topological quantum computer is to demonstrate definitive experimental evidence for the existence of Majorana fermions in condensed matter.
The fact that two laboratories found completely consistent results using a wide variety of device configurations casts serious doubt on the validity of the theoretically proposed experimental geometry and questions the 2017 claim of observing the angel particle. (Phys.org)