Welcome to the Quanta Audio Edition. In each of these bi-weekly episodes, we bring you a story

direct from the Quanta website about developments in basic science and mathematics. I'm Susan

Vallett. Is there a new type of quantum particle? One that's neither a matter particle nor a force-carrying particle?

A new proposal makes the case that these so-called para-particles could be created in exotic materials.

That's next.

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to enhance public understanding of science.

On a quiet pandemic afternoon in 2021, Jiwan WangWong, 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 quantum particle,

one that's neither a matter particle nor a force-carrying particle. It appeared to be something else

altogether. Wong was eager to develop the accidental discovery into a full theory of this

third kind of particle. So he brought the idea to

Caden Hazard, his academic advisor. Hazard remembers telling him that he wasn't sure if that could be true,

but if Wong really thought it was, he should drop everything else he's working on and focus on this

problem.

Wong is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany,

and in January of this year, he and Hazard published their refined result in the journal Nature.

They say that a third class of particles, called paraparticles can indeed exist, and that these particles could produce strange new materials.

When the paper appeared, Marcus Mueller, a physicist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna,

was already contending with the notion of para-particles for a different

...