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Majorana fermions can be bound to a defect at zero energy, and then the combined objects are called Majorana bound states or Majorana zero modes. [12] This name is more appropriate than Majorana fermion (although the distinction is not always made in the literature), because the statistics of these objects is no longer fermionic .
Spin-1/2 Majorana fermions, such as the hypothetical neutralino, can be described as either a dependent 4-component Majorana spinor or a single 2-component Weyl spinor. It is not known whether the neutrino is a Majorana fermion or a Dirac fermion; observing neutrinoless double-beta decay experimentally would settle this question.
Weyl fermions (massless), Dirac fermions (massive), and; Majorana fermions (each its own antiparticle). Most Standard Model fermions are believed to be Dirac fermions, although it is unknown at this time whether the neutrinos are Dirac or Majorana fermions (or both). Dirac fermions can be treated as a combination of two Weyl fermions.
Particles corresponding to Majorana spinors are known as Majorana particles, due to the above self-conjugacy constraint. All the fermions included in the Standard Model have been excluded as Majorana fermions (since they have non-zero electric charge they cannot be antiparticles of themselves) with the exception of the neutrino (which is neutral).
Ettore Majorana (/ m aɪ ə ˈ r ɑː n ə /, [2] Italian: [ˈɛttore majoˈraːna]; born on 5 August 1906 – likely dying in or after 1959) [1] was an Italian theoretical physicist who worked on neutrino masses.
In physics, particularly in quantum field theory, the Weyl equation is a relativistic wave equation for describing massless spin-1/2 particles called Weyl fermions. The equation is named after Hermann Weyl. The Weyl fermions are one of the three possible types of elementary fermions, the other two being the Dirac and the Majorana fermions.
In particle physics, majorons (named after Ettore Majorana) are a hypothetical type of Goldstone boson that are conjectured to mediate the neutrino mass violation of lepton number or B − L in certain high energy collisions such as e − + e − → W − + W − + J. Where two electrons collide to form two W bosons and the majoron J.
Second quantization, also referred to as occupation number representation, is a formalism used to describe and analyze quantum many-body systems. In quantum field theory, it is known as canonical quantization, in which the fields (typically as the wave functions of matter) are thought of as field operators, in a manner similar to how the physical quantities (position, momentum, etc.) are ...