Colloquium: Majorana Fermions in nuclear, particle and solid-state physics

Understand

Ettore Majorana (1906-1938) disappeared while traveling by ship from Palermo to Naples in 1938.

• His fate has never been fully resolved and several articles have been written that explore the mystery itself.
• His demise intrigues us still today because of his seminal work, published the previous year, that established symmetric solutions to the Dirac equation that describe a fermionic particle that is its own anti-particle.
• This work has long had a significant impact in neutrino physics, where this fundamental question regarding the particle remains unanswered.