On a quiet pandemic afternoon in 2021, Zhiyuan Wang(opens a new tab), 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 particle: one that’s neither a matter particle nor a force-carrying particle. It appeared to be something else altogether.

Wang was eager to develop the accidental discovery into a full theory of this third kind of particle. He brought the idea to Kaden Hazzard(opens a new tab), his academic adviser.

“I said, I’m not sure I believe this can be true,” Hazzard recalled, “but if you really think it is, you should put all your time on this and drop everything else you’re working on.”

This January, Wang, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, and Hazzard published(opens a new tab) 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.

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