Floating cars, fingernail-sized supercomputers, black hole travel and a bunch of other far-out concepts might be here sooner than you think, thanks to the weirdness of an arcane but surprisingly productive realm of physics centered around quasiparticles.
They’re not really even particles. Instead, quasiparticles are strange phenomena that emerge from interactions among the 17 particles that are the fundamental building blocks of matter: things like electrons or photons. Ninety years ago, Soviet physicist Lev Landau predicted that when particles come together under certain conditions, they would appear to bend the fundamental laws of physics.
Since then, physicists have proved that these uncanny groupings not only exist, they can even be useful. In the process, several quasiparticle researchers have won Nobel Prizes for their discoveries. But for the scientists who study them, an understanding of why these strange interactions occur remains elusive.
“We have mathematical equations that describe this [interaction] very, very accurately and successfully,” said Efthimios Kaxiras, a quantum physicist at Harvard University. “But if you dig very deep, why this happens is kind of a mystery.”
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