On March 25, 1938, Ettore Majorana — by then 31 years old and widely regarded as one of the most original physicists of his generation — boarded a ferry from Palermo to Naples. He left behind two letters, one addressed to his family and one to his colleague Antonio Carrelli, both indicating he intended to disappear. By most accounts, he was never seen again.
The disappearance has never been satisfactorily explained. Theories range from suicide to a quiet life in a monastery to emigration to South America. The Italian authorities never closed the case officially. Enrico Fermi, who knew Majorana well, said of him: “There are several categories of scientists. One the second or third rank do their best, but do not go very far. Then there are those of the first rank who make important discoveries. Then there are geniuses, like Galileo and Newton. Well, Ettore was one of those.”
What Majorana left behind in his last published paper, in 1937, was a single mathematical observation that has come to define a corner of modern particle physics. The objects we now call Majorana fermions — particles that are their own antiparticles — are one of the deepest open questions about neutrinos.
A child of the Sicilian aristocracy
Majorana was born in Catania, Sicily, in 1906, into a wealthy and intellectually distinguished family. His mathematical talent was apparent early. By his teenage years he was already considered something of a calculating prodigy. He moved to Rome to study engineering at the Sapienza University, then switched to physics under Enrico Fermi’s influence.
Fermi’s group at the Via Panisperna physics institute — “i ragazzi di Via Panisperna” — included Edoardo Amaldi, Franco Rasetti, Emilio Segrè, and later Bruno Pontecorvo. Majorana was, by general agreement, the strongest theorist of the group. Segrè later recalled that Fermi himself would defer to Majorana on mathematical questions.
Majorana’s first major paper, written in 1933 while visiting Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig, introduced what we now call the Majorana exchange forces — a model of nuclear forces that, in slightly modified form, became part of the standard picture of how protons and neutrons interact inside a nucleus.
He could have continued producing major work at that rate. He did not. By 1934, Majorana had largely withdrawn from active physics. He took a chair in theoretical physics at Naples in 1937, taught for a few months, and then disappeared.
The 1937 paper
Before his disappearance, Majorana published one final paper. It was about the relativistic equation of motion for fermions — the kind of mathematical question that occupied much of the 1930s in particle physics.
Paul Dirac, in 1928, had written down an equation describing relativistic electrons. The Dirac equation predicted the existence of antiparticles: every electron has a positron, every neutron has an antineutron, and so on. The Dirac picture is now the standard treatment of all charged fermions.
Majorana’s 1937 paper observed that for neutral particles, the math allowed a different possibility. A neutral fermion could in principle be its own antiparticle. The mathematical entity that describes such a particle is now called a Majorana fermion or, in modern usage, a Majorana spinor.
For thirty years, the idea seemed mostly mathematical curiosity. The known fermions of the time — electrons, protons, neutrons — were all clearly distinct from their antiparticles. The neutrino, when it was finally detected in 1956 by Cowan and Reines, was the only candidate where the Majorana possibility remained open.
Today, that question is still open. Whether neutrinos are Dirac particles (with distinct antiparticles) or Majorana particles (their own antiparticles) is one of the most important unsolved problems in particle physics. If they are Majorana, the see-saw mechanism explains why they are so light, and leptogenesis might explain why the universe has more matter than antimatter.
The disappearance
The facts of Majorana’s last days are sparse and ambiguous. He withdrew a large sum of money from his bank in March 1938. He purchased a ferry ticket from Naples to Palermo. He boarded the ferry. He wrote two letters from on board, both indicating an intention to take his own life. He arrived in Palermo. Then he disappeared.
Witnesses claimed to have seen him in various locations over the following weeks and decades — at the Hotel Sole in Naples, at a Franciscan monastery in Sicily, on a boat to Venezuela, in a Buenos Aires café. None of the sightings was ever conclusively verified.
In 2008, an Italian RAI documentary presented evidence that Majorana might have emigrated to Argentina and lived under a different name in Venezuela for several decades, possibly until the 1950s. In 2011, the Italian public prosecutor’s office in Rome announced it considered the evidence credible enough to formally close its investigation with the conclusion that Majorana had not died in 1938. The case remains historically unresolved.
A legacy that grew over decades
Majorana published only nine papers in his lifetime. By the standards of modern academic productivity, his career was meager. But the quality and originality of those papers — particularly the last one, on neutral fermions — have placed him among the most influential theoretical physicists of the twentieth century.
The terms Majorana mass, Majorana phase, and Majorana mixing are standard vocabulary in particle physics today. The search for neutrinoless double-beta decay — the most direct experimental test of whether neutrinos are Majorana particles — is one of the largest experimental programs in nuclear physics. Major underground laboratories around the world are competing to be the first to either detect 0νββ or rule it out.
Beyond neutrino physics, Majorana modes are sought after in solid-state physics as the basis for topological quantum computing. If physical systems can be engineered to exhibit Majorana-like behavior, they offer the prospect of qubits that are fundamentally protected from decoherence — one of the holy grails of quantum computing research.
Ettore Majorana never knew that his name would eventually attach itself to two of the more ambitious technological dreams of the twenty-first century. The Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics runs an annual Majorana lecture series. The Centre for Scientific Culture Ettore Majorana in Erice, Sicily, has hosted physicists from around the world since 1963. His face appears on Italian commemorative materials.
Where the man went is still unknown. What he left behind has only grown in importance.
For the physics question Majorana opened, see Majorana or Dirac?. For the Italian physicist who continued the neutrino story while Majorana vanished, see Bruno Pontecorvo.
Frequently asked
Who was Ettore Majorana?
Ettore Majorana (1906-1938 disappeared) was an Italian theoretical physicist regarded by his contemporaries — including Fermi — as one of the most original minds of his generation. He was part of Fermi's Via Panisperna group in Rome and made foundational contributions to nuclear and particle physics before vanishing under mysterious circumstances at age 31.
What is a Majorana fermion?
A particle that is identical to its own antiparticle. The concept comes from Majorana's last published paper (1937), in which he showed that the Dirac equation has a special real-valued solution describing such a self-conjugate fermion. Only neutral particles can be Majorana; all electrically-charged particles must be Dirac. Whether neutrinos are Majorana is still an open experimental question.
What happened to him?
On March 25, 1938, he boarded a ferry from Palermo to Naples and was never reliably seen again. He left letters indicating he intended to disappear. Various sightings were reported afterward — in monasteries, in South America, in Venezuela — but none confirmed. In 2015, Italian prosecutors closed an investigation concluding he had been alive in Venezuela between 1955 and 1959. The full story remains contested.
Why does the Majorana question matter today?
Because if neutrinos are Majorana particles, they would be their own antiparticles — and the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe could be explained through leptogenesis. The discovery would also imply that lepton number is not conserved. The neutrinoless double-beta decay experiments are the practical test: a positive signal would establish the Majorana nature directly.
Has the Majorana nature of neutrinos been confirmed?
Not yet. The major 0νββ experimental programs — LEGEND, KamLAND-Zen, nEXO, CUORE, NEXT-100 — are reaching the sensitivity where, if neutrinos are Majorana with inverted mass ordering, a signal must appear by the early 2030s. A continued null result would suggest either Dirac neutrinos or normal ordering with very small effective mass.
Cite this article 5 formats
APA
Neutrino Times Editorial Team. (2025, September 4). Ettore Majorana: the physicist who vanished and left a particle behind. Neutrino Times. https://neutrino-times.com/articles/ettore-majorana-the-physicist-who-vanished/
Chicago
Neutrino Times Editorial Team. "Ettore Majorana: the physicist who vanished and left a particle behind." Neutrino Times, September 4, 2025. https://neutrino-times.com/articles/ettore-majorana-the-physicist-who-vanished/.
MLA
Neutrino Times Editorial Team. "Ettore Majorana: the physicist who vanished and left a particle behind." Neutrino Times, 4 Sep. 2025, https://neutrino-times.com/articles/ettore-majorana-the-physicist-who-vanished/.
BibTeX
@misc{neutrino-times-ettore-majorana-the-physicist-who-vanished,
author = {Neutrino Times Editorial Team},
title = {Ettore Majorana: the physicist who vanished and left a particle behind},
howpublished = {Neutrino Times},
year = {2025},
month = {sep},
url = {https://neutrino-times.com/articles/ettore-majorana-the-physicist-who-vanished/},
note = {Accessed: 2025-09-04}
} RIS
TY - GEN TI - Ettore Majorana: the physicist who vanished and left a particle behind AU - Neutrino Times Editorial Team PY - 2025 DA - 2025-09-04 PB - Neutrino Times UR - https://neutrino-times.com/articles/ettore-majorana-the-physicist-who-vanished/ ER -