New 'phantom particle' discovered by Chinese scientists could mean you only need to charge your smartphone once a year

A research team in China claims to have caught a ghostly particle that has haunted and teased physicists for nearly a century.

The ground breaking discovery could boost the development of future technology such as quantum laptops faster than current super computers and smartphones that can last a year on one charge.

Led by professor Fang Zhong with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Physics in Beijing, the team confirmed the existence of Weyl fermions after years of research, according to a statement on the academy’s website.

The Weyl fermion is a massless particle proposed in 1929 by mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl. “You can imagine it as an extremely small magnetic bar, but with only one pole,” Dr Weng Hongming, a researcher involved in the project, told the South China Morning Post.

In nature, however small you cut a magnet, it retains north and south poles, the direction of the magnetic field which “flows” in or out at that point. With just one “pole” and no mass at all, the Weyl fermions can do many things impossible with current technology, Weng said.

This could have a dramatic effect on smartphones in particular, solving the problem of having to endless charge a device's battery.