Some things are easier to achieve if you’re not alone. As researchers from the University of Rostock, Germany have shown, this very human insight also applies to the most fundamental building blocks of nature.

At its very core, quantum mechanics postulates that everything is made out of elementary particles, which cannot be split up into even smaller units. This made Ph.D. candidate Vera Neef, first author of the recent publication “Pairing particles into holonomies,” wonder: “What can two particles only accomplish if they work as a team? Can they jointly achieve something, that is impossible for one particle alone?”