Talk:Boson/Archive 1

Archive 1

Spin

Many scientists determine bosons and fermions after theit spin value without explaining what is a cause for existing of this difference. Really, most of them know that the spin is a result of their inner motion. Some of this motions are determined by common coordinate, but others are determined by martices (bi-spinors) .As different common coordinates are commutative, then their inner oscillations along different oxes are independent and therefore they have a whole number h-bar spin. But other inner oscillations, which are determined by bi-spinors, which are no commutative, their oscillations along different oxes are strongly correlated and therefore they have a half number of h-bar spin. Consequently, if the inner oscillations are determined by commom coordinates, then their oscillations along differetn oxes are independent, then these excitations are bosons and if the inner oscillations are determined by bi-spinors, then their oscillations along differetn oxes are dependent, then these excitations are fermions.

So in a result of its inner motion the electric point-like electric charge make the own electric and magnetic fields of micro particle, then all fermions have zero values of electric intensity of own electric field in its moment plases and the double values of magnetic intensity of own magnetic fieldin some point and all bosobs have equal values of electric and magnetic intensities of their own electric and magnetic fields. Therefore the giromagnetic ratio of the magnetic dipole moment to the angular mechanical moment of the fermions are two times greater then this giromagnetic ratio fot their orbital boson motion.

Bosonic field and Fermionic field articles

We need some help defining just what a bosonic field is, and what a fermionic field is. Please see the discussion pages for Bosonic field and Fermionic field. Thanks. RK 19:54, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Corrections

I corrected a few mistakes in the article. For the record, Cooper pairs aren't bosons, since they can't meaningfully be considered as particles. _R_ 12:30, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Cooper pairs are particles, or quasiparticles, if you wish, and they are bosons. Maliz 14:29, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Sources?

1. The nucleus of Deuterium, an isotope of Hydrogen
2. Helium-4 atoms
3. Sodium-23 atoms
4. Any nucleus with integer spin

Can someone give me then source for this 4 types of bosons?Gravity^Talk 03:58, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Helium-4 nuclei are bosons -- http://concise.britannica.com/ebc/article-9080816/bosons Bertrem 06:19, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Are mesons bosons?

Are mesons bosons? I thought mesons were composed of quarks and anti-quarks, which are femrions, which would make mesons fermions, so they can't be bosons. I'm confused.24.21.139.41 15:47, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

A composite particle containing an odd number of fermions (quarks or leptons) is a boson. A composite particle containing an even number of fermions is a boson. Therefore, mesons are bosons.24.21.139.41 00:33, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Mesons are composite bosons, just as baryons are composite fermions. Mesons mediate force; baryons make up matter. Both are made up of elementary particles, and those elementary particles happen to be quarks. -- TheEditrix2 16:02, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

I think there is a little misleading sentence in composite particle section. Nucleons (in general all baryons) can NOT be bosons in any way, because they consists of 3 fermions (quarks). Since mesons consists of 2 fermions (quarks) they are ALWAYS bosons. In fact mesons are force carrier particles also as virtual mesons intermediate nuclear force between nucleons. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.190.175.192 (talk) 16:27, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Mesons are bosons. Yes, they are composed of quarks and antiquarks (=fermions), but you have to add their spin. If you add or subtract two one and a halfs, what do you get? ½+½ = 1 or ½-½ = 0. That means, you'll always get an integer. A particle with an integer spin obeys Bose-Einstein statistics, which means that it is a boson. So, mesons are bosons. Urvabara (talk) 18:42, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

=Graviton

The Graviton is listed as a hypothetical boson under "Elementary Bosons". Why does it need a dedicated section under "Other Bosons". Bosons are either elementary or composite. There's no need for an "other" category. I suggest to remove this section. I also dislike the "perfectly plausible" statement. That's POV.Pkoppenb (talk) 12:32, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

I removed the whole "other" category. Pkoppenb (talk) 07:58, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Origin of the name

There has been some edit warring going on with Higgs boson because some people seem to insist that the Higgs boson was named after Satyendra Bose. In the discussions there they've been pointed to this article, which explained the origin of the word 'boson'... at least until someone removed it. I think it should be mentioned here, but as there is now an edit war going on about that here too I thought I would bring this up. CodeCat (talk) 14:48, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

I've re-added it. No reason why it was removed in the first place and the addition makes this article consistent with Higgs boson. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 13:57, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Examples of Bosons

This has an ugly link to the main article, being "List of particles#Bosons (integer spin)". Would it no be better to do this the other way arround: move the content of that section of the of particles to this page and put a link there instead of here?

Also, the "basic properties" section already mentions most of the content of this section, it would make more sense to only mention things once. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.136.210.137 (talk) 01:24, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! I made the link pretty. But I think it's best the info stays where it is. Woz2 (talk) 11:03, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Please add Fermion to the "See Also" links?

Fermion seems to be missing from the "See Also" section, but I think that it deserves its place there. Thanks, 76.10.128.192 (talk) 12:15, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Per WP:ALSO: "As a general rule the "See also" section should not repeat links which appear in the article's body or its navigation boxes." --NeilN ^{talk to me} 12:55, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Edit request on 9 July 2012

The beginning of the article defines a boson as a subatomic particle. This should be changed to 'particle' because atoms as well as molecules can also be bosons. Under 'Composite Bosons' on this page, He4 atom is listed as an example.

</ref>) are particles with integer spin (s = 0, 1, 2 etc.)

JimmyDRoberts (talk) 03:23, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Done! Thanks! Woz2 (talk) 10:08, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Additionally, the definition section states "when one swaps two bosons, the wavefunction of the system is unchanged". that makes me think I could swap a composite boson with a elementary boson and the system would be unchanged.68.83.98.40 (talk) 04:20, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

This page is no longer protected, so you can made any needed edits yourself. RudolfRed (talk) 04:31, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

This won't occur to a scientist, because the concept of boson only makes sense for a system of particles of the same type, but I imagined you could mix two or more systems made of different types and added a brief note. Materialscientist (talk) 04:36, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Did you just say that it won't occur then give an example of it occurring regularly?68.83.98.40 (talk) 04:42, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

The term boson is only used when describing statistics of a system of identical particles. When such systems are mixed, the particles are called by their primary names (photons, alpha particles, etc. I know no examples when Bose statistics is applied to such mixtures, but admittedly I am not a specialist in this specific area. Materialscientist (talk) 04:47, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Pronunciation

Having heard numerous university professors pronounce the word as "boh-zon", I was startled to see the pronunciation here given with a hard "s", "boh-son". I noticed a few credible sources have this new, nonstandard pronunciation. Hard to understand, given that it was named after physicist Bose, pronounced somewhere between "boh-zay" and "bo-shu", i,e no hard "S". People got it mixed up with "boatswain", and I guess it stuck. I have NEVER heard an actual physicist pronounce it with a hard S. I will come back to this with another reference, I think Collins, and add it as a second pronunciation.77Mike77 (talk) 06:14, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Symbolism?

Re this: " the four gauge bosons (
γ
·
g
·
Z
·
W^±
)", is that a formatting mistake, or is it a special symbolism used in subatomic physics? It is not standard use of math symbols. Why the round brackets and raised dots, if all you are doing is listing the four gauge bosons? Why not just separate them by standard commas?77Mike77 (talk) 19:02, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

"Elementary bosons" outdated

I just read in the Elementari bosons section the following:

"As of July 2012, most physicists at the CERN Large Hadron Collider believe they may have observed these particles, although further tests are needed to confirm this discovery."

I don't have the knowledge to fix the section, but believe that it's something quite important to update...

Peoro (talk) 01:32, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Bosons occupying the same physical space?

OK, now that that's settled, I have another question. Are composite bosons, made of fermions, subject to the Pauli exclusion principle? It's my understanding that you can have an unbounded number of elemental bosons, like say, photons, with the same properties, in the same physical space. It seems non-intuitive that fermions which experience exclusion, when assembled into composite baryons, cease to experience exclusion, especially with respect to physical location. But then, quantum mechanics is not necessarily intutive or sensical in the same way that classical mechanics is. Now, you don't see an unbounded number of helium-4 nuclei inhabiting the same physical space, but then again, they are electrically charged, and so experience electrical repulsion. What do the textbooks have to say about that? -- Beland 22:39, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

We need to make a distinction between He-4 nuclei and He-4 atoms, which are neutral. Maliz 14:41, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

• Actually, Bose and Einstein said that a boson could meaning hypothetically occupy the same quantum state as other bosons. Normally, they don't. It is only in Bose-Einstein condensates that it was proven that they were right about bosons being able to occupy the same physical space or same quantum state.--Voyajer 19:41, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

So in fact any number of helium nuclei can actually occupy the same physical space at the same time? =:-O

An effective theory of He-4 atoms consists of atomic bosons with a pairwise repulsive van der Waals potential. It is precisely this repulsive van der Waals potential which prevents two He-4 atoms from occupying the same location in space. However, if we work in momentum space instead (the Fourier transform), two He-4 atoms can have the same momentum. This is precisely what we get in superfluid He-4. Admittedly, a He-4 atom is composite and the repulsive part of the van der Waals interaction comes from the exclusion principle of the electrons, but even if we have a hypothetical theory with a fundamental noncomposite boson with a repulsive potential at short distances, we still wouldn't find two bosons occupying the same location in physical space. Maliz 14:41, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

I addressed the problem in a new section, without a knowledge about this discussion. Google found some scholarly works about this, such as http://pra.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v54/i6/pR4633_1 . Incnis Mrsi (talk) 12:17, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Question: Can bosons occupy the same physical or quantum state in parallel dimensions? Furthermore, can they occupy themselves in the same? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.25.67.229 (talk) 17:03, 4 July 2012

Dubious statements, lack of references

This article claims that Helium-4 and Sodium-23 and other nuclei are bosons. I think someone is confused; atomic nuclei are composed of quarks, which are fermions, not bosons. On the off chance that it is I who am confused, I've left these claims in and merely tagged them as disputed. This article completely lacks any authoritative references. I'm sure any reasonable modern quantum mechanics textbook could both resolve the dispute and act as a good reference. -- Beland 01:23, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Nuclei with integer spin are bosons. Here's a reference, sorry about the poor source: "Bosons include mesons, nuclei of even mass number, and the particles required to embody the fields of quantum field theory." [1]. The issue isn't discussed in Gasiorowicz, I'll see if Sakurai has it. -- Tim Starling 03:26, August 16, 2005 (UTC)

Ah, I think I was confused about the dual senses of "integer-spin entity" and "elemental boson". That should definitely be more clearly explained. -- Beland 06:02, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

From Sakurai Modern Rev. Ed. (ISBN 0-201-53929-2) p362:

Even more remarkable is that there is a connection between the spin of a particle and the statistics obeyed by it:

Half-integer spin particles are fermions;

Integer spin particles are bosons.

Here particles can be composite; for example, a ³He nucleus is a fermion just as the e^- or the proton; a ⁴He nucleus is a boson just as the π^±,π⁰ meson.

The spin-statistics question is, as far as we know, an exact law of nature with no known exceptions. In the framework of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, this principle must be accepted as an empirical postulate. In the relativistic quantum theory, however, it can be proved that half-integer spin particles cannot be bosons and integer spin particles cannot be fermions.

-- Beland 22:39, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

It’s all trivial. A really significant problem is that even in quantum mechanics not every “particle” has a certain spin. For example, an atom with exactly specified electron configuration and constituents’ spins (including the nuclear spin) has, but an atom in an unspecified state hasn’t (although it is certainly either a boson or a fermion). A nucleus in its ground state has, but a nucleus in a broader sense, including isomers and their superpositions with the ground state, hasn’t. See talk:Spin–statistics theorem #The spin can be uncertain, but bosons never mix with fermions for details. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 19:33, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Boson/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

Important topic but the article is very short and needs some wikifying imo. Snailwalker | talk 00:53, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Last edited at 00:53, 15 October 2006 (UTC). Substituted at 10:06, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Only other?

Up there in the intro is the seemingly out of place sentence "The only other boson is the Higgs..." One wonders: "only other"? How 'bout pions, gluons, W and Z bosons, gravitons, and 200-some "only others"? I'm tempted to chop the sentence entirely, but I don't know what was intended by the original author. Anyone able to weigh in? --TheEditrix2 15:58, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Chop it. You listed several counterexamples, and the author of the sentence should be expected to either:

• be accurate
• complete his thought

for it to remain in the article. No need to wait for this to happen for such a minimal piece off info. 70.250.238.188 (talk) 22:39, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

I wasn't aware of the 200 plus " only other" but it is it pretty impressive a particle so genius that single handedly holds the entire Universe together. The Higgs-Boson is everything. The entire world should know about and be raving about the Higgs-boson. Starwest155 (talk) 00:53, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Unclear statement

The meaning of the following statement

"Fermions are usually associated with matter (although in quantum mechanics the distinction between the two concepts is not clearcut)"

is not clear. What are the "two concepts" referred to? I might imagine they are matter and energy, but a reader should not have to supply the other side of an unspecified dichotomy just to understand a sentence.Dratman (talk) 19:05, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

This “associated” or “related” gibberish—beloved by some Wikipedians—was in this instance rather benign. Much worse, the preceding “bosons with the same energy can occupy the same place in space” contradicted to the Heisenberg's principle, as well as to some other parts of the article existing since 2014. Both are dealt with by now. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 19:39, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

Should have something about massive and massless bosons

I expected to find something here about boson mass. For instance the reader might suppose that perhaps all bosons are massless, given the example of the photon as the only particle a non specialist will recognize in the lede.

So I think the lede should briefly mention that while some are massless, some are massive, so perhaps some of our experts here could expand briefly on this, and give a list of massive and massless bosons. There is interesting physics here to explain as in this paragraph in the W and Z bosons article:

"The fact that the W and Z bosons have mass while photons are massless was a major obstacle in developing electroweak theory. These particles are accurately described by an SU(2) gauge theory, but the bosons in a gauge theory must be massless."

Robert Walker (talk) 12:25, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

 I agree. The question of whether a boson has mass is what led me to this entry.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:306:CF99:2080:CB:46D7:7CC8:9C37 (talk) 19:39, 30 December 2019 (UTC) 

This is of special interest for Conformal cyclic cosmology in which all matter eventually decays to light, which has just hit the news with an article in New Scientist, 15th August 2018 - which is how I ended up on this page, to find out more about how Roger Penrose deals with all particles, including electrons, eventually decaying. If I understand right his paper actually suggests that eventually all particles lose mass, including electrons, and including presumably the massive bosons too. Writing:

"A much more satisfying possibility, from my own perspective, is that the electron’s mass will eventually decay away—and, again, there is all of eternity for this to happen, so the possibility may not be too outrageous to contemplate"

Whether this is relevant to this article, the idea that all particles eventually could lose mass, I leave it to other editors to decide. It doesn't seem to be mentioned in the main Conformal cyclic cosmology which has no mention of the word mass so I'm going to suggest that we include something on the topic in that article on its talk page. Robert Walker (talk) 12:46, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

References

which is the defining property?

Please see the discussion at Talk:Fermion on whether spin or symmetry is the defining property of fermions and bosons. Fpahl 06:19, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

As written, the second paragraph of this article appears to be, well, a little circular. To paraphrase, "all observed bosons have integral spin because particles with integral spin are defined as bosons." This isn't terribly enlightening. jmdeur 20:37, 15 Jan 2008 (UTC)