Helium White Dwarf Stars Bear New Quasiparticle

eldavojohn writes "Helium white dwarf stars are now theorized to produce a new kind of quasiparticle that would explain a known temperature anomaly between helium white dwarfs and vanilla white dwarfs (lumps of charcoal). Since helium can form a Bose-Einstein condensate and there are extra constraints inside such a dense object, a new quasiparticle emerges. Researchers' models claim it 'reduces the specific heat of the white dwarf core by two orders of magnitude compared to a crystalline core.' But even with that figured in, measurements of some nearby ancient helium white dwarfs show that they don't fit the specific temperature curve exactly. So, some questions remain, with the possible explanation that these stars undergo internal transition late in their age. The heavy reading is available on the prepublication site arXiv."

Re:Anyone else get the feeling

[boristhespider]

There's a reason they're calling it a "quasiparticle". A quasiparticle is an effective particle that arises when you perturb a quantum system - they're effectively the quantum analogues of sound waves. Depending on the type of system, you can get various types of quasiparticle. The most basic would be phonons, which are literally quantised sound waves, and which I imagine would crop up in any system (but I'm not a condensed matter physicist and haven't touched it in ten years so there may be systems possible where phonons don't arise and I wouldn't know). In some quantum fluids you can get things called rotons forming, which you could view as kind of quantised vortices. In more complicated systems again you get quasiparticles emerging with all manner of weird and wonderful behaviours, and about ten years back Volovik showed something beautiful, which is that if you take a particular state of superfluid Helium the quasiparticles that emerge have all the symmetries of the standard model of particle physics *and a graviton*. Which is really extremely beautiful when you think about it.

Anyway, those are quasiparticles: well-defined quantum fluctuations of a system.

The particles you're referring to are from speculative high-energy physics, and are on much shakier ground, as the physicists who propose them would readily admit. Those particles are generally "real" in a sense that quasiparticles aren't (although I wouldn't stretch the term "real" too far even for something like virtual photons or gluons or other gauge bosons; even so, the fundamental nature of the particle is very different to the quasiparticle).