source: Nautilus

Quasiparticles a kind of particle

  • emerge out of complicated interactions between huge numbers of fundamental particles (quarks, photons, electrons)
  • can be stable. Two reasons
    1. they emerge at very low temperatures
    2. they only interact with each other weakly
  • can have properties like mass and charge
  • some physicists think fundamental particles are emergent as well

example: polarons

  • discovered in 1933
  • materialize when many electrons get trapped inside a crystal
  • push and pull between electrons “dress” an electron. It acts like a quasiparticle with larger mass
  • mixture of matter and light

condensed matter is related

Researchers can create quasiparticles that have a fraction of electron’s spin or charge

a “hole”: the absence of an electron where it should exist

exciton: quasiparticle made of an electron and a hole that orbit each other

  • photons blend with exitons to form polaritons, which behave like liquid light en masse - frictionless, doesn’t scatter

Majorana quasiparticles hypothesized, half electron and half hole at the same time

  • could be used to create supercomputers
  • zero energy, zero charge. This could allow them to exist inside of a superconductor

magnon - a quasiparticle made from bits of a magnetic field on motion across a material