Breakthrough Discoveries in 2012. Second on the list, just after the discovery of the Higgs boson by CERN, is “spotting the first evidence of the elusive Majorana fermion in a solid.” The entry is attributed to “Leo Kouwenhoven and colleagues at the Delft University of Technology and Eindhoven University of Technology.”
“Majorana fermions” are particles that are also their own antiparticles and were first proposed in 1937 by the Italian physicist Ettore Majorana. More recently, physicists have argued that Majorana-like quasiparticles could be lurking in materials with special topological properties. In April of last year, Professor Leo Kouwenhoven and colleagues spotted the first hints of Majorana fermions at the interface between a topological superconductor and a semiconductor. Majorana fermions are expected to be impervious to environmental noise and therefore could prove useful in quantum computers.
Just a little further down the list is another Dutch discovery. “To Allard Mosk and colleagues at the MESA+ institute at the University of Twente for developing a new technique for seeing fluorescent objects behind opaque barriers.”
That refers to a recent publication by Allard Mosk and colleagues who have used a common effect called laser speckle to see micrometre-sized fluorescent objects through several millimetres of opaque material. This technique could well have medical applications, as tissue is opaque to much of the electromagnetic spectrum – including visible light – doctors are limited in terms of what they can “see”.
Read the whole list on: physicsworld top 10
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