weyl

Weyl fermions obey the Weyl equation, and Majorana fermions the Majorana equation.

To make a Majorana, you impose an additional algebraic condition on the two Weyls (take the complex conjugate of Weyl #2, reshuffle it a bit, and you get Weyl #1).

They are cousins of the Dirac equation (think about how a Dirac point and a Weyl point are related).

According to wikipedia [1], the cited paper merely demonstrates the finding of a quasi-particle [3] that behaves like a Weyl Fermion.

It sounds like they though neutrinos were Weyl points, and neutrinos are real particles.

There is still some debate about whether neutrinos are Weyl or Majorana fermions.

Something similar happens in this discovery, there is some aspect of the dynamic in the crystal that can be described as a Weyl spinor.

Majorana fermions are their own anti-particles, while Weyl fermions are not.

For a moment, I confused Weyl points with Ley lines and was shocked by disbelief.

I actually like Weyl better, even if it hasn't seen active development in ~2 decades.

So are Weyl points still a proposed real particle?

E_8 as a Lie group is 'continuous', and therefore infinite, and E_8 as a Weyl group has size much, much, much bigger than 248.

So a less mystifying way to describe the achievement of "making Weyl fermions" is simply "making massless fermions".

That aside, there is a mathematically well-defined sense in which Weyl fermions are the most "fundamental" fermions: the other kinds you hear about, Dirac and Majorana, can all be written as combinations of Weyl fermions.

I was referring to the "Wheeler-DeWitt equation" [1] and not the "Weyl equation" [2].

Hermann Weyl's book Symmetry [1] is a more truly leisurely introduction, much more a discussion of the ideas than a math book.

When you look at the equations, it's immediately obvious that what the mass term does is mix the two Weyls in a Dirac: even if you prepare a pure state of one Weyl, as soon as you set the clock ticking, the mass term will turn it into a mix of two Weyls...