Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Elementary particles are the building blocks of matter, but there is also a zoo of quasiparticles that are crucial for understanding how this matter behaves.
Quasiparticles are an extremely useful concept that provides a more intuitive understanding of complex phenomena in many-body physics. As such, they appear in various contexts, linking ideas across different fields and supplying a common language.
The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz “for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter”.
