Bosons Condense and Fermions ‘Exclude’, But Anyons…? Available to Purchase

The familiar classification of particles into bosons and fermions may not hold in certain two‐dimensional systems. Those systems allow the existence of particles or particle‐like excitations with properties that are intermediate between those of fermions and bosons. Frank Wilczek (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) named such entities anyons in 1982, in the third of a series of papers that year in which he laid the foundation for their systematic study. The logical affirmation of the existence of anyons rests on some of the most intriguing ideas in physics, such as the magnetic monopole, the Aharonov‐Bohm effect and the quantization of charge and angular momentum.