Mentions of Majorana fermions don't happen often. They're exceptional, but elusive. In fact, they're so exceptional, that anyone who says they found one gets insta-hype. But they're so elusive that most people who say they found one are in fact lying.
For example, IBM says they found them. That was a lie. In fairness, the scientists are not lying in the absolute sense, they're excited and thus biased, because they think they found the holy grail of quantum computing. Companies, on the other hand, don't care so much about scientific integrity, and will make announcements with no intent to vet their veracity. The bigger the potential stock price increase, the less vetting. And so every few years, we get an announcement, usually by IBM, that they found the Majorana fermion, followed by a stock price increase, and then followed, usually much later, like years later, by a retraction, as in this case: Zhang, H., Liu, CX., Gazibegovic, S. et al. Retraction Note: Quantized Majorana conductance. Nature 591, E30 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03373-x
In this (unrelated?) case below, not from a starry-eyed tech company, the news goes like this:
They created a classical, room-temperature liquid-crystal system, opening the door to a brand-new field that the scientists call time liquid crystallinity, where fluid-like materials can be organized over time rather than just in space, and that invokes the Majorana spirits.
Scientists catch classical space-time crystals moving like Majorana quasiparticles
Jun 2026, phys.org
To achieve this, the team took a liquid-crystal material—similar to the fluid used in smartphones and television screens—and doped it with ionic substances. They then applied a rhythmic, repeating electrical signal to the fluid. But that caused period doubling, driven by the motion of tiny, localized structures in the fluid called topological solitons and disclinations.These shifting states behave exactly like the particle-antiparticle pairs of Majorana particles, a famous, elusive class of quantum particles that are their own antiparticles. In this system, they serve as a classical, real-world analog of these quantum objects.Time Liquid Crystallinity - where fluid-like materials can be organized over time rather than just in space
via Hiroshima University and University of Colorado: Hanqing Zhao et al, Emergent discrete space-time crystal of Majorana-like quasiparticles in chiral liquid crystals, Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-70880-8
Totally Unrelated Image credit: Anomalous Galaxy Grid
--Source: Identifying astrophysical anomalies in 99.6 million source cutouts from the Hubble legacy archive using AnomalyMatch. David O’Ryan and Pablo Gómez. A&A, 704 (2025) A227. DOI:
