On a quiet pandemic afternoon in 2021, Zhiyuan 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.
A beautiful story for the grand kids... or the one to tell the audience when accepting the Nobel prize.
Makes me want to check the story behind the anyons, another set of particles beyond fermions and bosons, but that can only exist in 2D.
Non Abelyan anions are particularly interesting in the context of quantum computers. I would not be surprised if paraparticles, if realised, will become relevant in the same context.