New Particle Discovered After 80 Years Of Searching

A team of physicists at Princeton University and the University of Texas at Austin announced on October 2 that they have observed a new particle that has eluded detection for nearly 80 years! It only took scientists 48 years to detect the Higgs boson. No one really knew how they would go about searching for this particle until 2001, which is why it's taken the better half of a century to detect it. Meet the Majorana fermion. This new particle was first predicted by Italian physicist Ettore Majorana in 1937, and is unique because it is the only particle in existence that can adopt both matter and antimatter characteristics simultaneously without annihilating itself in the process.

This is kind of exciting and can only be practically beneficial. Because it allows scientists to manipulate exotic particles for potenetial applications, such as quantum computing. In order to observe these particles, the team had to use a very large microscope -- a two-story tall microscope to be exact that is located at Princeont's Jadwin Hall. Pretty cool, huh?