Two Notre Dame physicists, Xinyu Liu and Jacek Furdyna, collaborated with Purdue physicist Leonid Rokhinson on constructing a novel nanostructure that allowed them to observe a long-sought-after particle referred to as Majorana fermion. 

The existence of this particle has been predicted by Ettore Majorana in the 1930s, but until now has eluded observation. In a Purdue press release on the subject, Professor Rokhinson has pointed out that “The search for this particle is for condensed-matter physicists what the Higgs boson search was for high-energy particle physicists. It is a very peculiar object, because it is a fermion, and yet it is its own antiparticle, with zero mass and zero charge.”