Fractionally charged solitons

Move over, quarks. Make room for solitons with fractional charges. These newcomers have surfaced in theories from two distinct branches of physics—relativistic field theory and condensed‐matter physics. The appearance of solitons (solitary wave solutions to nonlinear problems) in a wide range of physics problems is increasingly common, but their association with non‐integer quantum numbers is a new feature. The analogous mathematical structure of the theories that show this feature is especially appealing to particle theorists because the predictions of the condensedmatter model are more amenable to experimental verification than are those of the more abstract field theories.