The Majorana discoveries are condensed matter physics, not particle physics. In particular, when they say that they've discovered "a new particle" it's importa

The Majorana discoveries are condensed matter physics, not particle physics. In particular, when they say that they've discovered "a new particle" it's important to understand that this is not going to appear on the Standard Model of Particle Physics at any time soon (unless, say, neutrinos, which are already on that model, turn out to be Majoranas). We've discovered excitations at the end of nanowires which appear to behave like Majoranas were supposed to, and we've worked out some theory which predicts that they were supposed to be there, and if they are there then they're "topologically" protected from a lot of the usual sources of noise, so we might be able to make long-lived qubits for a change. That's about what we know about Majorana fermions, minus some details.