9 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 34.9 ms ] thread
"When the quasiparticles travel along one dimension inside the ZrSiS crystals, they do so at the speed of light and are therefore massless. But as soon as they try to travel in a different direction, they hit resistance, slow down and gain mass."

It's like traveling from vs. to the US and Europe and yes, those planes also gain/lose infinitesimal amounts of mass.

I think “loses” lends itself to clickbait.

It’s either 0 or massful.

“Loses”, to my eye, implied a continuous ability to remove mass, and led me to wonder if one could achieve negative masses with the experiment’s technique.

But I’ll save you the click: in one direction it’s massless (traveling at the speed of light), and in the other direction it has mass.

Saying "particle" instead of "quasiparticle" is also a little click-baity. Although, admittedly, the general public probably has no idea what a quasiparticle is. Not that the article does a very good job of explaining it.
So these "particles" are actually not particles, but "quasi-particles".

In other words, throw away scientific rigor as soon as you can get a clickbaity headline.

(comment deleted)
It's not a particle, it is a quasi-particle. Those are field manifestations that happen on solid state, like solitons and holes, so it is cool, but no fundamental change do the standard model or anything like that.