Any student of particle physics can tell you that all subatomic particles in Nature fall into two distinct classes: fermions (electrons, neutrons, protons, etc.) and bosons (photons and other force-carrying "messenger" particles).
Back in 1982, however, physicist Frank Wilczek and several of his colleagues proposed that -- theoretically, at least -- there could be particles that exist between those two discrete classes.
Wilczek dubbed them "anyons" because any anyon can be anything between a boson and a fermion. "Wilczek is a funny guy," Tassilo Keilmann told Symmetry Breaking. Keilmann is a physicist at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University, and he's designed an experiment he thinks will bring anyons into the realm of the observable world, using cold atoms and lasers -- and a smidgen of ingenuity.
Read More: http://news.discovery.com/space/anyons-straddle-the-gap-between-bosons-and-fermions-111106.html
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