> There's nothing very mysterious about it, it's a modeling trick.
I wouldn't say it's just a trick. They have remarkable properties.
Quasiparticles (such as holes) have simple, relatively long-lived, non-dissipative properties like fundamental particles, such as momentum that is conserved along a path until an interaction, interactions with other particles, and a simpler wavefunction than would be expected from the combination of constituent fundamental particles.
They emerge from large numbers of fundamental particles acting together in harmony.
Like a bubble in water, except water doesn't harmonise that much, so it doesn't make a bubble with momentum (or spin) against the flow of water keep moving the same way until it collides with another bubble.
The 3-body motion problem produces chaos. It's a wonder that a 1000-body collection of electrons and nuclei holds a quasiparticle together instead of quickly turning into a non-linear, thermodynamic mess, and that interactions with other particles couple with the entire collection at once, to maintain the integrity of the quasiparticle.
At some level it's like a bubble, but the harmony is decidedly a quantum effect.
I wouldn't say it's just a trick. They have remarkable properties.
Quasiparticles (such as holes) have simple, relatively long-lived, non-dissipative properties like fundamental particles, such as momentum that is conserved along a path until an interaction, interactions with other particles, and a simpler wavefunction than would be expected from the combination of constituent fundamental particles.
They emerge from large numbers of fundamental particles acting together in harmony.
Like a bubble in water, except water doesn't harmonise that much, so it doesn't make a bubble with momentum (or spin) against the flow of water keep moving the same way until it collides with another bubble.
The 3-body motion problem produces chaos. It's a wonder that a 1000-body collection of electrons and nuclei holds a quasiparticle together instead of quickly turning into a non-linear, thermodynamic mess, and that interactions with other particles couple with the entire collection at once, to maintain the integrity of the quasiparticle.
At some level it's like a bubble, but the harmony is decidedly a quantum effect.