Abstract
Publisher Summary This chapter discusses fermions and bosons. Particles with spin 1/2 are fermions, whereas those with spin zero are bosons. An examination of the formal origin of this difference shows that it is because of the different nature of the expressions for the energy density in the scalar and spinor fields. All particles with half-integral spin are fermions and those with integral spin are bosons. A composite particle containing an even number of fermions is a boson, and one containing an odd number of fermions is a fermion. If a system consists of particles of various kinds, then creation and annihilation operators must be defined separately for each kind of particle. The operators pertaining to different bosons, or to bosons and fermions, commute. Operators pertaining to different fermions may be regarded, in the nonrelativistic theory, as either commuting or anticommuting. In the relativistic theory, which allows transformations of particles into one another, the creation and annihilation operators of different fermions must be regarded as anticommuting, like those pertaining to different states of the same fermions.
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