Artistic rendering of particles. Image: Gerd Altmann, on Pixabay.
By James Myers
According to a recent mathematical proof published in Nature, we might have to add a new fundamental particle category, called paraparticles, to the two known particle types.
The authors of the paper entitled “Particle exchange statistics beyond fermions and bosons,” Zhiyuan Wang and Kaden Hazzard, suggest that locating paraparticles in condensed matter systems “may show a wealth of new phenomena,” including new phases and phase transitions in matter.
Phase transitions change the behaviour of a material system. For example, moving liquid water undergoes a phase transition when it freezes into solid ice. As we reported last May, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently uncovered a hidden phase transition in materials like glass and plastic that could lead to the development of new materials for medical devices, drug delivery, and other applications.
Wang and Hazzard speculate that paraparticles might exist as fundamental particles of nature, when it has long been thought that there are only two categories of particles. One, called fermions, includes electrons and neutrinos, and the other is called bosons that include the photon which is the particle of light.
Fermions and bosons are two fundamental physical particle types. Hadrons are composite particles, and can fall into one category or the other depending on their composition. Image by Hugo Spinelli, on Wikipedia.
While bosons and fermions operate in the four dimensions of space and time, paraparticles can theoretically exist in any number of dimensions.
Dr. Zhuyian Wang co-authored the paper on paraparticles. Image: Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics.
The researchers indicate the existence of paraparticles would lead “to exotic free-particle thermodynamics,” which might upend our understanding of thermodynamic processes that describe the movement and interactions of energy.
It’s already understood that, at all temperature ranges, more thermodynamic energy and quantum information can be extracted from bosons than fermions. For both particle types, the second law of thermodynamics is a bedrock principle that says energy moves in only one direction (commonly referred to as the “arrow of time”). While the researchers don’t discuss the potential effects of introducing paraparticles to established laws of thermodynamics, it raises intriguing possibilities.
One difference between the two existing particle types is that fermions are mutually repellent, whereas bosons can coalesce in groups with the same direction and frequency. The two categories are further differentiated by their “spin,” which is the number of rotations of 360 degrees that they have to make to return to their original configuration. Fermions like electrons have half-integer spin, written as 1/2, where the denominator of 2 indicates that fermions have to make two full rotations – a total of 720 degrees – to return to their original state. Bosons like the photon, on the other hand, have a full-integer spin of 1 and only have to complete one rotation to achieve their original state.
When they’re exchanged with other particles, paraparticles would behave like fermions and return to their original state when the exchange is reversed.
In addition to fermions and bosons, but having no mass and existing only in one or two dimensions, are anyons.
Physicist Dr. Kaden Hazzard co-authored the mathematical proof of paraparticles.. Image: Rice University.
Unlike fermions and paraparticles, anyons do not return to their original state when swapped with other particles. In our article The Geometry of Information: Is Topological Quantum Computing the Future?, we wrote about how anyons are being explored for their potential to record, in two dimensions, sequences of quantum information generated in four-dimensional spacetime.
The possible existence of paraparticles has been theorized and studied since 1953, but for a long time they were thought to be indistinguishable from fermions and bosons. In their paper published in Nature in January, Wang and Hazzard provide the mathematics that differentiate paraparticles. They conclude that their mathematical formulation “is valid in any spatial dimension and can be extended to incorporate special relativity, hinting at the potential existence of elementary paraparticles in nature.”
Although it’s too early to predict the potential applications of paraparticles, one possibility might be for encoding quantum information for computational purposes. Wang told Scientific American that although paraparticles are “unlikely to be as robust as anyons” in quantum computations, their operation in three dimensions could provide an advantage to anyons that are limited to two dimensions.
Wang explained to the Rice University newspaper The Rice Thresher, “[Paraparticles] enable a secret communication protocol in which two parties with paraparticles can communicate over long distance … without them ever coming close to each other, and without them leaving any trace that could be detected by a third party.”
The mathematical model created by Wang and Hazzard might, in theory, allow a fully functioning quantum computer to create paraparticles for research and identification of potential applications. Since they retain memory of their exchanges with other particles, both paraparticles and anyons offer the potential for improved quantum circuits that are currently limited by their propensity to disconnect, a problem called “decoherence.”
Paraparticles and anyons are examples of emerging information that is leading to a deeper understanding of the properties of matter such as hidden phase transitions. Now shown to be mathematically possible, it remains unknown whether paraparticles can be created.
If scientists succeed in generating these exotic particles in three or many more dimensions, the discovery could unleash a host of applications now unimagined but potentially important to the advancement of materials science, quantum information processing, and the technologies that might follow.
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