Colloquium: Photons and electrons as emergent phenomena

@article{Levin2004ColloquiumPA,
  title={Colloquium: Photons and electrons as emergent phenomena},
  author={Michael Levin and Xiao-Gang Wen},
  journal={Reviews of Modern Physics},
  year={2004},
  volume={77},
  pages={871-879}
}
Recent advances in condensed-matter theory have revealed that new and exotic phases of matter can exist in spin models (or more precisely, local bosonic models) via a simple physical mechanism, known as ``string-net condensation.'' These new phases of matter have the unusual property that their collective excitations are gauge bosons and fermions. In some cases, the collective excitations can behave just like the photons, electrons, gluons, and quarks in our vacuum. This suggests that photons… 
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