'Paraparticles' Would Be a Third Kingdom of Quantum Particle

When you swap two paraparticles, these hidden properties change in tandem. As an analogy, imagine that these properties are colors. Start with two paraparticles, one that’s internally red and another that’s internally blue. When they swap places, rather than keeping these colors, they both change in corresponding ways, as prescribed by the mathematics of the particular model. Perhaps the swap leaves them green and yellow. This quickly turns into a complex game, where paraparticles affect each other in unseen ways as they move around. Meanwhile, Müller was also busy rethinking the DHR theorems. “It’s not always super transparent what they mean, because it’s in a very complicated mathematical framework,” he said. His team took a new approach to the paraparticle question. The researchers considered the fact that quantum systems can exist in multiple possible states at once — what’s called a superposition. They imagined switching between the perspectives of observers who exist in these s ... Read full article.