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One dimension was assumed to be even more restrictive. Two new papers suggest that assumption may be wrong \u2013 and what they find in one dimension is stranger than anyone expected.<\/p>\n
Two camps of particles<\/p>\n
Walk into a physics<\/a> class, and you\u2019ll learn that nature serves up two kinds of elementary particles. <\/p>\n Bosons carry forces \u2013 photons, for example. Fermions make up matter, including electrons, protons, and neutrons.<\/p>\n The dividing line shows up when two identical particles trade places. When two bosons swap places, nothing changes. Fermions flip the whole system\u2019s sign. <\/p>\n Physicists have only observed those two outcomes in three-dimensional space.<\/p>\n Locked at two<\/p>\n The reason the menu is so short comes from a quantum principle called indistinguishability. <\/p>\n Physicists cannot mark or color-code two identical electrons in any way. Swap them, and the new arrangement is physically identical to the old one.<\/p>\n That restriction forces the outcome into one of two possibilities. Either the swap leaves the system completely unchanged, or it flips it. <\/p>\n Those are the only options the physics allows. Bosons do the first. Fermions do the second.<\/p>\n A third option<\/p>\n In three dimensions, the split holds neatly. Drop down to two, and theorists have predicted something stranger for half a century: particles that don\u2019t fit either category \u2013 ones that land somewhere between unchanged and flipped, in a range no ordinary particle ever reaches.<\/p>\n They call them anyons \u2013 any-ons, neither one nor the other. Predicted since the 1970s and first observed in 2020, they\u2019re real \u2013 but only at the edge of two-dimensional materials.<\/p>\n That sighting only sharpened the question for Thomas Busch, who leads the Quantum Systems Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST<\/a>).<\/p>\n \u201cEvery particle in our universe seems to fit strictly into two categories: bosonic or fermionic. Why are there no others?\u201d said Busch.<\/p>\n When space gets thin<\/p>\n Dimension changes the rules because of how particle paths weave through space and time. Three-dimensional space gives particles room to curve around each other when they swap \u2013 paths braid briefly, then untangle cleanly. The swap leaves no trace.<\/p>\n In two dimensions, that escape hatch closes. The paths become knotted in ways physicists cannot undo, and the outcome no longer has to fall into one of the two familiar categories.<\/p>\n A 2020 paper<\/a> caught the effect in ultracold semiconductors under extreme magnetic fields. Ra\u00fal Hidalgo-Sacoto, a Ph.D. student in Busch\u2019s group at OIST and lead author on both new studies, lays out the topology in plain terms.<\/p>\n \u201cIn lower dimensions, this exchange is no longer topologically equivalent to doing nothing. To satisfy the law of indistinguishability, we need exchange factors over a continuous range to account for the exchange, dependent on the exact twists and turns of the paths,\u201d said Hidalgo-Sacoto.<\/p>\n Squeezed to a line<\/p>\n Push down one more dimension<\/a>, and something new happens. In one dimension, particles can no longer take the long way around each other. They have to pass through. That single change rewrites the swap entirely.<\/p>\n Until this study, no one had worked out whether anyons could survive in one dimension at all \u2013 let alone what their behavior would look like.<\/p>\n The two OIST papers, co-authored with Doerte Blume at the University of Oklahoma, show that they can. They also reveal a property no one expected.<\/p>\n Turning the dial<\/p>\n The exchange factor in 1D isn\u2019t locked at a single value. It can be dialed \u2013 tied directly to how strongly the particles interact at close range. <\/p>\n That kind of control is something physicists have wanted for decades.<\/p>\n Crank it one way, and the particles behave more like bosons. Turn it the other, and they look more like fermions. The particles no longer have a fixed identity. Instead, their behavior acts more like a dial.<\/p>\n What changes now<\/p>\n Ultracold atoms, chilled with lasers within a hair of absolute zero, are precisely the platform where one-dimensional physics gets done every day. <\/p>\n A recent experiment<\/a> in Austria has caught anyonic behavior in a similar 1D ultracold gas, lending early support to the OIST picture.<\/p>\n \u201cThe experimental setups necessary for making these observations already exist,\u201d said Busch. Groups in Japan, Europe, and the United States are positioned to run them.<\/p>\n The boson-fermion binary stops being a binary on the line. Not two options. A spectrum. Physicists gain a value they can tune continuously \u2013 one that opens a fresh corner of fundamental physics and could feed new kinds of quantum simulators.<\/p>\n The study is published in Physical Review A<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read?\u00a0Subscribe to our newsletter\u00a0<\/a>for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on\u00a0EarthSnap\u00a0<\/a>, a free app brought to you by\u00a0Eric Ralls\u00a0<\/a>and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Physicists rarely question one of the field\u2019s most fundamental rules: every particle in the Universe is either a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":442808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[85,46,370,141],"class_list":["post-442807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-physics","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-physics","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/442808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}