(Newswire.net — July 23, 2015) — After 85 years of searching, scientists have confirmed the existence of a massless particle called the Weyl fermion, the Science Alert reported.
The newly discovered particle has the unique ability to behave as both matter and anti-matter inside a crystal, creating electrons that have no mass.
What does it means in term of applied science?
Because Weyl fermions travel differently than electrons, both existing and non-existing features give them almost ‘teleporting powers’, so they can avoid obstacles or pass through them, traveling extra-long distances instantly, without losing their charge.
“It’s like they have their own GPS and steer themselves without scattering,” lead researcher and physicist M. Zahid Hasan from Princeton University in the US, said in press release.
“Weyl fermions could be used to solve the traffic jams that you get with electrons in electronics – they can move in a much more efficient, ordered way than electrons,” Hasan told Anthony Cuthbertson over at IBTimes. “They could lead to a new type of electronics we call ‘Weyltronics’.”
So what exactly is a Weyl fermion?
Back in 1929, a German physicist named Hermann Weyl theorised the existence of a massless particle, the fermion, that could carry a charge far more efficiently than regular electrons, which have a tendency to scatter when they collide with obstacles.
Reportedly, the team at Princeton led by Zahid Hasan has proved that fermons exist. In fact, they’ve shown that in a test medium, Weyl electrons can carry charges at least 1,000 times faster than electrons in ordinary semiconductors, and twice as fast as inside wonder-material graphene.
“They will move and move only in one direction since they are either right-handed or left-handed and never come to an end because they just tunnel through. These are very fast electrons that behave like unidirectional light beams and can be used for new types of quantum computing,” Zahid Hasan said.
The fact that the fermion has been proved in a university laboratory by shooting photons through a synthetic crystal, and not in a multi billion dollar facility such as the Large Hadron Collider, is particularly important because of the affordable costs of further testing. The scientists, however, are still not sure exactly how this finding will affect modern technology.
“The physics of the Weyl fermion are so strange, there could be many things that arise from this particle that we’re just not capable of imagining now,” said Hasan