Majorana fermions at Fermi velocities: a condensed matter perspective
Majorana fermions were predicted almost eighty years ago. While ardently sought in particle physics, conclusive evidence as to their presence is still lacking. Recently, there has been an intensive race towards realizing them in a condensed matter setting. The trigger for this effort is the developing understanding that their realization will open a pathway to a novel quantum computation scheme known as topological quantum computation. In this talk I will describe the type of systems that can realize Majorana fermions and state of the art experiments that are being devised to detect their presence.