Quasiparticles arise out of a collection of particles, that's why they're emergent
Maybe 'emergent' was the wrong word here. I meant that particles are convenient ways of describing behavior of the fields in many (but not all) cases, with the fields themselves considered to be the (more) fundamental description of reality.
Quantization exists and isn't just a convenience.
First of all, if you think of a photon as some small ball, not that's not what it is. Mathematically a photon is defined as a state of the EM field (which has been quantised into a set of harmonic oscillators called "normal modes") in which there is exactly one quantum of excitation of a specific normal mode (with given wavevector and frequency). Depending on which kind of modes you consider, a photon could be a gaussian beam, or even a plane wave, so not something localised like you would say of a particle.
Unlike photons, electrons have a position operator, so in principle you can measure and say where one electron is. The same is impossible for photons. Also electrons have a mass, but photon are massless. This means you can have motionless electrons, but this is impossible for photons: they always move at the speed of light. Electrons have a non-relativistic classical limit, while photon do not.
W. E. Lamb used to say that people should be required a license for the use of the word "photon", because it can be very misleading.
Annoyingly, people often use "exponential" colloquially to mean anything faster than linear, but in fact lots of things are faster than linear.
From the other responses, it sounds like "none of the above". It's more like a "polynomial curve" that is only sometimes quadratic. Is "polynomial curve" a thing? "Power curve" / "power function"?
Ok, it's different in that liquid flows through pipes and electrons flow through crystal lattices or whatever, so electrons go between and around the material while liquid is bounded by it.
It makes me speculate that electron flow through a metal is sort of like liquid flowing through a compressible boundary tube, whereas flow through a non-metal has rigid walls. Non-metals reject the electrons, metals allow them to play Spiderman and hitch a temporary ride (if you'll forgive the overly particle-centric analogy.)
If resistivity is determined by the equivalent of turbulence, though, I've no idea what the graph against temperature should be. Do electrons travel faster when there's less resistance?
Reminds me of the elephant and rope adage: young elephants are trained with small chains, which as they mature they outsized and could easily break but don't.
Though to give credit to researchers, those new experiments of "listening" for electron perturbations seem amazing. That's just a brilliant idea. Theorists often like to pretend they're better than the experimentalists, but without proper data the theorists get stuck in dead ends. ;)
baerrie•5h ago