Sunday, September 9, 2012

Ultracold Fermions Simulate Spin-Orbit Coupling

Sometimes there are headlines you just have to repeat, even when you have no earthly idea what they mean.

Here's the story if you're enough of a masochist to try to figure it out. I can usually puzzle my way through these since most non-scientific-journal articles aim at folks who don't have any specialized education in the field at hand, but this one is beyond me.

There is an intriguing note at the end -- apparently the experiments described in the article may help in the search for a subatomic particle called "Majorana fermions," which have the property of being their own antiparticles. Since an antiparticle is exactly like a particle except for its electrical charge -- electrons have a certain mass and a negative electrical charge; anti-electrons have the exact same mass but a positive charge, for example -- that would seem to mean that Majorana fermions somehow have both positive and negative charges at the same time. I don't think that's supposed to be possible, but I've spent the last couple of hours trying to figure out spin-orbit coupling and my head hurts waaaaaaaaay too much to be sure.

(Ed. 9/10 to correct "Majorama fermions" to "Majorana fermions")

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