Weyl fermions to Help in the Development of Quantum Computers

Discovered by Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, The weyl seminetal (a solid-state crystal the low energy excitations of which are Weyl fermions) will lead to further study of Weyl fermions, a type of massless elementary particle hypothesized by high-energy particle theory and potentially useful for creating high-speed electronic circuits and quantum computers.

A crystal of molybdenum and tellurium was created where the hole and electron bands are normally separated by an indirect gap touch at a few Weyl points. Those points are equivalent to magnetic monopoles in the momentum space and are connected by Fermi arcs.

Further research should point the way to an increased number of new materials with unusual transport properties.