If what we think of as real particles are really just useful abstractions over a more complicated reality, but that underlying reality is basically the same thing mathetmatically that exists in condensed-matter, is there a significant difference? Where does the analogy break down?
From a theorists perspective there is not much difference, they are both modeled by Quantum Field Theories. However condensed matter theory deals mostly with non-relativistic phenomena. The idea of quasiparticles, like the one they have discovered is also present in particle physics, they are called "resonances". Depending on the energy scale you can integrate out the higher energy modes of your theory to get an effective theory, in which those resonances are now the "fundamental particles", examples include pions, Kaons etc. This is analogous to how you describe quasi-particles in condensed matter theory.
In contrast to condensed matter theory which is able to observe electrons on their own, the fundamental constituents in high energy particle physics have not all been observed on their own. So called quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons among other things, ordinarily never occur alone, due to something called confinement. This is analogous to how at low temperature in super conductors electrons appear as so called cooper pairs coupled by phonons, here quarks are in a "cosmic superconductor" coupled by gluons. One of the aims of the LHC experiment is to go to high enough energy to induce a phase transition to a quark gluon plasma, which would be analogous to the state electrons are normally in a metal.
So in conclusion, it's not a coincidence that both the renormalization group by wilson and the idea for the Higgs mechanism, which also has an analogue in the theory of high temperature superconductivity and was originally proposed by Anderson in the context of condensed matter theory, were discovered by theorists working in condensed matter theory.
Yes, there is a significant difference: although the quasiparticle shows the same behavior as the 'real' particle in some respects, it shows different behavior in other respects.
For instance, the quasiparticle can be destroyed by the addition of some heat to the system, while a 'bare' Majorana fermion would not cease to exist in the presence of that amount of energy.
Analogy: in certain measurements (e.g. distribution of reflected light frequencies), a red circle is indistinguishable from a red sphere. However, in other respects (e.g. distribution of reflected light intensity), they are quite different.
There is a pretty strong overlap between material science and quantum field theory. To name just one example, the idea of the Higg's particle actually has it's genesis in theoretical solid state physics [1].
Most material solids can be described as a lattice, where there is some unit cell of a given size, say L, which is repeated periodically in all directions.
There are various types "quasi-particles" that can move through a lattice, examples include phonon's and poloron's. The thing that makes the quasi-particle concept useful is that it is greatly simplifies the description of the collective motion of a large number of particles which are all interacting.
An electromagnetic field in a region of space can (sort of) be described as a lattice, and this result is one of the deepest and most profound results in theoretical physics, imo. The basic idea is the EM field can be thought of in the following way: every point in space can be treated mathematically as a simple vibrating spring (harmonic oscillator).
In other words, the analogy between fundamental particles and quasi-particles breaks down because in a material solid there is a unit cell of size L, but in the vacuum this lattice size is 0.
The idea that every point in space is a harmonic oscillator works in the sense that it makes predictions that agree with experiment; however theoretically it has an extremely severe flaw which has motivated a large amount of research on the quantum vacuum. The problem is that the energy of a region of space with zero EM field (i.e. a vacuum) comes out to be infinite. There are various tricks to avoid this infinity, but the simplest one is to just use some non-zero value for the lattice spacing of the vacuum.
Comments
Honest question:
If what we think of as real particles are really just useful abstractions over a more complicated reality, but that underlying reality is basically the same thing mathetmatically that exists in condensed-matter, is there a significant difference? Where does the analogy break down?
From a theorists perspective there is not much difference, they are both modeled by Quantum Field Theories. However condensed matter theory deals mostly with non-relativistic phenomena. The idea of quasiparticles, like the one they have discovered is also present in particle physics, they are called "resonances". Depending on the energy scale you can integrate out the higher energy modes of your theory to get an effective theory, in which those resonances are now the "fundamental particles", examples include pions, Kaons etc. This is analogous to how you describe quasi-particles in condensed matter theory.
In contrast to condensed matter theory which is able to observe electrons on their own, the fundamental constituents in high energy particle physics have not all been observed on their own. So called quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons among other things, ordinarily never occur alone, due to something called confinement. This is analogous to how at low temperature in super conductors electrons appear as so called cooper pairs coupled by phonons, here quarks are in a "cosmic superconductor" coupled by gluons. One of the aims of the LHC experiment is to go to high enough energy to induce a phase transition to a quark gluon plasma, which would be analogous to the state electrons are normally in a metal.
So in conclusion, it's not a coincidence that both the renormalization group by wilson and the idea for the Higgs mechanism, which also has an analogue in the theory of high temperature superconductivity and was originally proposed by Anderson in the context of condensed matter theory, were discovered by theorists working in condensed matter theory.
Yes, there is a significant difference: although the quasiparticle shows the same behavior as the 'real' particle in some respects, it shows different behavior in other respects.
For instance, the quasiparticle can be destroyed by the addition of some heat to the system, while a 'bare' Majorana fermion would not cease to exist in the presence of that amount of energy.
Analogy: in certain measurements (e.g. distribution of reflected light frequencies), a red circle is indistinguishable from a red sphere. However, in other respects (e.g. distribution of reflected light intensity), they are quite different.
There is a pretty strong overlap between material science and quantum field theory. To name just one example, the idea of the Higg's particle actually has it's genesis in theoretical solid state physics [1].
Most material solids can be described as a lattice, where there is some unit cell of a given size, say L, which is repeated periodically in all directions.
There are various types "quasi-particles" that can move through a lattice, examples include phonon's and poloron's. The thing that makes the quasi-particle concept useful is that it is greatly simplifies the description of the collective motion of a large number of particles which are all interacting.
An electromagnetic field in a region of space can (sort of) be described as a lattice, and this result is one of the deepest and most profound results in theoretical physics, imo. The basic idea is the EM field can be thought of in the following way: every point in space can be treated mathematically as a simple vibrating spring (harmonic oscillator).
In other words, the analogy between fundamental particles and quasi-particles breaks down because in a material solid there is a unit cell of size L, but in the vacuum this lattice size is 0.
The idea that every point in space is a harmonic oscillator works in the sense that it makes predictions that agree with experiment; however theoretically it has an extremely severe flaw which has motivated a large amount of research on the quantum vacuum. The problem is that the energy of a region of space with zero EM field (i.e. a vacuum) comes out to be infinite. There are various tricks to avoid this infinity, but the simplest one is to just use some non-zero value for the lattice spacing of the vacuum.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Warren_Anderson