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What Is a Particle?
By Natalie Wolchover
Elementary particles are the basic stuff of the universe. They are also deeply strange.
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With any other object, the object’s properties depend on its physical
makeup — ultimately, its constituent particles. But those particles’
properties derive not from constituents of their own but from mathematical
patterns. As points of contact between mathematics and reality, particles
straddle both worlds with an uncertain footing.
When I recently asked a dozen particle physicists what a particle is, they
gave remarkably diverse descriptions. They emphasized that their answers
don’t conflict so much as capture different facets of the truth. They also
described two major research thrusts in fundamental physics today that are
pursuing a more satisfying, all-encompassing picture of particles.
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mechanics some 250 years after that proved both luminaries right: Light
comes in individual packets of energy known as photons, which behave as
both particles and waves.
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A particle is thus a collapsed wave function. But what in the world does
that mean? Why does observation cause a distended mathematical function
to collapse and a concrete particle to appear? And what decides the
measurement’s outcome? Nearly a century later, physicists have no idea.
The picture soon got even stranger. In the 1930s, physicists realized that
the wave functions of many individual photons collectively behave like a
single wave propagating through conjoined electric and magnetic fields —
exactly the classical picture of light discovered in the 19th century by
James Clerk Maxwell. These researchers found that they could “quantize”
classical field theory, restricting fields so that they could only oscillate in
discrete amounts known as the “quanta” of the fields. In addition to
photons — the quanta of light — Paul Dirac and others discovered that
the idea could be extrapolated to electrons and everything else: According
to quantum field theory, particles are excitations of quantum fields that fill
all of space.
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A Particle Is an ‘Irreducible
Representation of a Group’3
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Mark Van Raamsdonk remembers the beginning of the first class he took
on quantum field theory as a Princeton University graduate student. The
professor came in, looked out at the students, and asked, “What is a
particle?”
It’s the standard deep answer of people in the know: Particles are
“representations” of “symmetry groups,” which are sets of transformations
that can be done to objects.
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Elementary particles with one and five spin labels also appear in nature.
Only a representation of the Poincaré group with four spin labels seems to
be missing.
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Particles with the same energy, momentum and spin behave identically
under the 10 Poincaré transformations, but they can differ in other ways.
For instance, they can carry different amounts of electric charge. As “the
whole particle zoo” (as Quinn put it) was discovered in the mid-20th
century, additional distinctions between particles were revealed,
necessitating new labels dubbed “color” and “flavor.”
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Sheldon Glashow lectured at CERN in December 1979, two weeks after he was
awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
CERN
Take the property known as color: In the 1960s, physicists ascertained that
quarks, the elementary constituents of atomic nuclei, exist in a probabilistic
combination of three possible states, which they nicknamed “red,” “green”
and “blue.” These states have nothing to do with actual color or any other
perceivable property. It’s the number of labels that matters: Quarks, with
their three labels, are representations of a group of transformations called
SU(3) consisting of the infinitely many ways of mathematically mixing the
three labels.
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The Standard Model reigns half a century after its development. Yet it’s an
incomplete description of the universe. Crucially, it’s missing the force of
gravity, which quantum field theory can’t fully handle. Albert Einstein’s
general theory of relativity separately describes gravity as curves in the
space-time fabric. Moreover, the Standard Model’s three-part SU(3) ×
SU(2) × U(1) structure raises questions. To wit: “Where the hell did all
this come from?” as Dimitri Nanopoulos put it. “OK, suppose it works,”
continued Nanopoulos, a particle physicist at Texas A&M University who
was active during the Standard Model’s early days. “But what is this
thing? It cannot be three groups there; I mean, ‘God’ is better than this —
God in quotation marks.”
In the 1970s, Glashow, Nanopoulos and others tried fitting the SU(3),
SU(2) and U(1) symmetries inside a single, larger group of transformations,
the idea being that particles were representations of a single symmetry
group at the beginning of the universe. (As symmetries broke,
complications set in.) The most natural candidate for such a “grand unified
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theory” was a symmetry group called SU(5), but experiments soon ruled
out that option. Other, less appealing possibilities remain in play.
Researchers placed even higher hopes in string theory: the idea that if you
zoomed in enough on particles, you would see not points but one-
dimensional vibrating strings. You would also see six extra spatial
dimensions, which string theory says are curled up at every point in our
familiar 4D space-time fabric. The geometry of the small dimensions
determines the properties of strings and thus the macroscopic world.
“Internal” symmetries of particles, like the SU(3) operations that transform
quarks’ color, obtain physical meaning: These operations map, in the string
picture, onto rotations in the small spatial dimensions, just as spin reflects
rotations in the large dimensions. “Geometry gives you symmetry gives you
particles, and all of this goes together,” Nanopoulos said.
The first of these research efforts goes by the slogan “it-from-qubit,” which
expresses the hypothesis that everything in the universe — all particles, as
well as the space-time fabric those particles stud like blueberries in a muffin
— arises out of quantum bits of information, or qubits. Qubits are
probabilistic combinations of two states, labeled 0 and 1. (Qubits can be
stored in physical systems just as bits can be stored in transistors, but you
can think of them more abstractly, as information itself.) When there are
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multiple qubits, their possible states can get tangled up, so that each one’s
state depends on the states of all the others. Through these contingencies,
a small number of entangled qubits can encode a huge amount of
information.
So far, researchers know much more about how this all works in toy
universes that have negatively curved, saddle-shaped space-time — mostly
because they’re relatively easy to work with. Our universe, by contrast, is
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The fact that holographic space-time always has these particle states is
“actually one of the most important things that distinguishes these
holographic systems from other quantum systems,” he said. “I think
nobody really understands the reason why holographic models have this
property.”
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These researchers argue that quantum field theory, the current lingua
franca of particle physics, tells far too convoluted a story. Physicists use
quantum field theory to calculate essential formulas called scattering
amplitudes, some of the most basic calculable features of reality. When
particles collide, amplitudes indicate how the particles might morph or
scatter. Particle interactions make the world, so the way physicists test
their description of the world is to compare their scattering amplitude
formulas to the outcomes of particle collisions in experiments such as
Europe’s Large Hadron Collider.
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In the meantime, Engelhardt said, “‘We don’t know’ is the short answer.”
1: “At the moment that I detect it, it collapses the wave and becomes a particle. … [The
particle is] the collapsed wave function.”
—Dimitri Nanopoulos (back to article)
2: “What is a particle from a physicist’s point of view? It’s a quantum excitation of a field.
We write particle physics in a math called quantum field theory. In that, there are a bunch
of different fields; each field has different properties and excitations, and they are different
depending on the properties, and those excitations we can think of as a particle.”
—Helen Quinn (back to article)
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6: “Every particle is a quantized wave. The wave is a deformation of the qubit ocean.”
—Xiao-Gang Wen (back to article)
7: “Particles are what we measure in detectors. … We start slipping into the language of
saying that it’s the quantum fields that are real, and particles are excitations. We talk
about virtual particles, all this stuff — but it doesn’t go click, click, click in anyone’s
detector.”
—Nima Arkani-Hamed (back to article)
Editor’s note: Mark Van Raamsdonk receives funding from the Simons
Foundation, which also funds this editorially independent magazine. Simons
Foundation funding decisions have no influence on our coverage. More
details are available here.
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