Neither matter nor force-carrying... what's left for a particle to do if neither of those? Kind of a mind-bending thing to contemplate
2 weeks ago | 79
Starting from math and seeing if there's any way it could be physical seems like a very inefficient way of doing physics. String theory, SuSy, axions: we can play that game all day and waste our limited resources. Meanwhile there are plenty of real contradictions with experiment and theoretical inconsistencies to sort out!
1 week ago | 0
Being Asian and studying at rice university is just cruel. My French friend just graduated from baguette U, it was his second choice after silly hats and cigarettes technical institute.
2 weeks ago | 66
Is this at all similar to treating electron holes as quasi-particles or an unrelated branch of physics?
2 weeks ago | 2
= parafermions/ plektons (basically higher dimensional analogs of anyons)?
2 weeks ago (edited) | 0
What kind of particle does human math allow, not necessarily what the world allows 😉
2 weeks ago | 9
If the Higgs boson was already nicknamed the "GOD particle", lord knows what names and nicknames and classes and types and generations these paraparticles are gonna get
2 weeks ago | 3
BREAKING: Mathematicians finally find numbers -- "There they are..."
2 weeks ago | 3
Some of these pages are literally popular science magazine like. That's great but I myself prefer the science for amateur enthusiast.
2 weeks ago (edited) | 0
Quanta Magazine
On a quiet pandemic afternoon in 2021, Zihyuan Wang, then a graduate student at Rice University, was alleviating his boredom by working on a weird mathematical problem. After he found an exotic solution, he started to wonder if the math could be interpreted physically. Eventually, he realized that it seemed to describe a new type of particle: one that’s neither a matter particle nor a force-carrying particle. It appeared to be something else altogether.
Wang was eager to develop the accidental discovery into a full theory of this third kind of particle. He brought the idea to Kaden Hazzard, his academic adviser.
“I said, I’m not sure I believe this can be true,” Hazzard recalled, “but if you really think it is, you should put all your time on this and drop everything else you’re working on.”
This January, Wang, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, and Hazzard published their refined result in the journal Nature. They say that a third class of particles, called paraparticles, can indeed exist, and that these particles could produce strange new materials.
When the paper appeared, Markus Müller, a physicist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna, was already contending with the notion of paraparticles for a different reason. According to quantum mechanics, an object or observer can be in multiple locations at once. Müller was thinking about how you can, on paper, switch between the perspectives of observers in these coexisting “branches” of reality. He realized that this came with new constraints on the possibility of paraparticles, and his team described their results in a preprint in February that’s now under review for publication in a journal.
The close timing of the two papers was a coincidence. But taken together, the work is reopening the case of a physics mystery that was believed to be solved decades ago. A basic question is being reevaluated: What kinds of particles does our world allow?
🔗 Read the story: www.quantamagazine.org/paraparticles-would-be-a-th…
🎨 Kristina Armitage
2 weeks ago | [YT] | 1,424