‘Paraparticles’ Would Be a Third Kingdom of Quantum Particle
A new proposal makes the case that paraparticles — a new category of quantum particle — could be created in exotic materials. The post ‘Paraparticles’ Would Be a Third Kingdom of Quantum Particle first appeared on 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…