  As early as 1932, Majorana had proposed that a pure permutation symmetric
state of N spin- 1 2 particles can be represented by N spinors, which
correspond geometrically to N points on the Bloch sphere. Several decades after
its conception, the Majorana representation has recently attracted a great deal
of attention in connection with multiparticle entanglement. A novel use of this
represen- tation led to the classification of entanglement families of
permutation symmetric qubits - based on the number of distinct spinors and
their arrangement in constituting the multiqubit state. An elegant approach to
explore how correlation information of the whole pure symmetric state gets
imprinted in its parts is developed for specific entanglement classes of
symmetric states. More- over, an elegant and simplified method to evaluate
geometric measure of entanglement in N-qubit states obeying exchange symmetry
has been developed based on the distribution of the constituent Majorana
spionors over the unit sphere. Multiparticle entanglement being a key resource
in sev- eral quantum information processing tasks, its deeper understanding is
essential. In this review, we present a detailed description of the Majorana
representation of pure symmetric states and its applicability in investigating
various aspects of multiparticle entanglement.
