'Paraparticles' Would Be a Third Kingdom of Quantum Particle

quantamagazine.org

54 points·rbanffy··9 comments

Here's a link to the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08262-7

I really wish they tied this into representation theory, because it looks like the R-tensors are similar to representations of the permutation group, but I don't see exactly how to write them in terms of representations.

The r-tensors are a representation of the symmetric group, and this is stated right after eqn. 4.

I thought there was a little more structure than just that (since that's been around since the 1940s).

It was previously known as a possibility, but it wasn't believed to have observable consequences. This paper relates it to degeneracy pressure in noninteracting systems.

> If paraparticles exist, they’ll most likely be emergent particles, called quasiparticles

So are these just a new flavor of quasiparticle, like an electron “hole”, or are they possibly real particles? The article seems contradictory.

They can definitely arise as quasi particles.

It's not impossible that there could also be fundamental particles with this property. It would require some new symmetry to be found, for which there is currently no evidence, but it might be found be reconsidering existing data.

Right now they are neither a real particle or quasiparticle. They are a hole in a "theorem" that was previously thought to close off our imagination to new basic categories of particles.

Convergence strikes again!

It’ll be super interesting to follow the developments with this one.

Something this simple has to be real.

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