Albert Manqué is a physicist of the old school. Fifty years ago physicists could make experiments using material from the hardware store, says Manqué, who works at the Centre de l’Étude des Choses Assez Minuscules in Paris. I too prefer to work on a small scale. His penchant for tabletop research recently paid off. He and a colleague at the center have discovered an extraordinary new fundamental particle. Although the particle exists for just millionths of a second, it is the size of a bowling ball. Its existence, says Manqué, could possibly explain a host of mysterious phenomena.
Manqué and his colleague Jean-Xavier Zweistein call the new particle a bigon and say its discovery was serendipitous. Their main research consists of building better vacuum tubes to replace microchips. We are the only physicists in the world working on that, more or less, says Manqué. They were running a large current ...
