Rice physicists prove existence of ‘paraparticles,’ previously thought impossible
A Rice physics professor has proven the existence of particles that were long thought impossible. Kaden Hazzard and his former graduate student, Zhiyuan Wang, presented their findings in a Jan. 8 Nature publication.
It was previously believed that all fundamental particles fall into only two categories, fermions and bosons, according to Andrew Long, a Rice professor specializing in theoretical particle physics. Electrons and protons are fermions, while photons are bosons, the two fundamental categories of subatomic particles.This maxim is so widely accepted, he said, that it is practically a “guiding principle” in physics.
The existence of ‘paraparticles,’ a debated outlier that doesn’t belong to either category of particle, was first proposed in 1953, Long said. However, further work in the 1970s debunked that claim, concluding that these paraparticles were just another form of bosons and fermions.
“The ground-breaking work of Wang and Hazzard casts paraparticles in a new light,” Long wrote in an email to the Thresher. “They argue that paraparticles can exist as emergent quantum particles, and that they cannot be reformulated as bosons or fermions.”
The particle statistics model used to make this claim is known as parastatistics. In their research, Wang and Hazzard worked to refine this model and theoretically demonstrate the existence of paraparticles.
“The idea that you can have new particle statistics, that’s really the novel thing in this paper,” Hazzard said.
Wang, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany and the first author of the paper, said the idea first came to him in 2021 during his doctoral degree, at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“[I was] super bored at home, so I worked on a weird mathematical problem to entertain myself,” Wang wrote in an email to the Thresher. “I found a very strange and exotic solution to that problem, and when I interpreted it physically, the idea of parastatistics appeared.”
Initially, Wang said his idea was met with skepticism from others, including Long and Hazzard.
“I liked to think about experiments, be very practical, and [Wang] convinced me that there was some virtue to looking at fancy math when it’s appropriate,” Hazzard said. “It reinforces the idea that you should be really open-minded when a student tells you something that sounds wrong.”
In order to realize their theory, Wang and Hazzard said they employed advanced mathematical tools such as Hopf algebra, group theory and Lie algebra. According to Hazzard, he had to learn much of this math over the course of the project.
“[These results] further strengthen my belief in the power of mathematics in describing and uncovering laws of nature,” Wang wrote.
While the existence of paraparticles has been proven theoretically, Wang hopes to ultimately observe them in experiments.
According to Long, he is optimistic about the experimental realization of paraparticles, although there is work to be done to merging parastatistics with relativity — another central tenet of physics.
“I’d be willing to bet that an experimental confirmation of paraparticles is not too far away,” Long wrote. “The theory work by Wang and Hazard is helping to pave the pathway to discovery.”
Similar research could prove useful in the quantum information space, according to Wang.
“[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,” Wang wrote.
Mustafa Amin, a theoretical cosmologist and physics professor, said astrophysics and cosmology are another space where these particles could be studied. In particular, he is interested in seeing if dark matter particles, which make up the majority of the universe, obey parastatistics.
“Guided by the novel work in this paper, the cosmological implications of particles obeying parastatistics would be fun to work through,” Amin wrote in an email to the Thresher.
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