Bosön - Composite Bosons

Composite Bosons

Composite particles (such as hadrons, nuclei, and atoms) can be bosons or fermions depending on their constituents. More precisely, because of the relation between spin and statistics, a particle containing an even number of fermions is a boson, since it has integer spin.

Examples include the following:

• Any meson, since mesons contain one quark and one antiquark
• The nucleus of a carbon-12 atom, which contains 6 protons and 6 neutrons
• The helium-4 atom, consisting of 2 protons, 2 neutrons and 2 electrons.

The number of bosons within a composite particle made up of simple particles bound with a potential has no effect on whether it is a boson or a fermion.

Fermionic or bosonic behavior of a composite particle (or system) is only seen at large (compared to size of the system) distance. At proximity, where spatial structure begins to be important, a composite particle (or system) behaves according to its constituent makeup. For example, two atoms of helium-4 cannot share the same space if it is comparable in size to that of the inner structure of the helium atom itself (~10−10 m)—despite bosonic properties of the helium-4 atoms. Thus, liquid helium has finite density comparable to the density of ordinary liquid matter.