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?
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
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