Exotic particle that is both matter, anti-matter

In a major breakthrough, scientists have observed an exotic particle that behaves simultaneously like matter and antimatter, a feat of math and engineering that could yield powerful computers based on quantum mechanics.

Using a two-story-tall microscope, the scientists captured a glowing image of a particle known as a "Majorana fermion" perched at the end of an atomically thin wire - just where it had been predicted to be after decades of study and calculation dating back to the 1930s.

"This is the most direct way of looking for the Majorana fermion as it is expected to emerge at the edge of certain materials," said lead researcher Ali Yazdani, a professor of physics at Princeton University in the US.

Despite combining qualities usually thought to annihilate each other - matter and antimatter - the Majorana fermion is surprisingly stable; rather than being destructive, the conflicting properties render the particle neutral, so that it interacts very weakly with its environment.

This aloofness has spurred scientists to search for ways to engineer the Majorana into materials, which could provide a much more stable way of encoding quantum information, and thus a new basis for quantum computing.

The hunt for the Majorana fermion began in the earliest days of quantum theory when physicists first realised that their equations implied the existence of "antimatter" counterparts to commonly known particles such as electrons.

In 1937, Italian physicist Ettore Majorana predicted that a single, stable particle could be both matter and antimatter.

Although many forms of anti-matter have since been observed, the Majorana combination remained elusive.

The findings appeared in the journal Science.