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This Huge confusion with Fermions and Bosons and how they relate to total spin of atom says a hydrogen atom is a boson.

I'm confused. I thought bosons were force carrying - e.g. a photon, gluon, etc?

Qmechanic
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Snowcrash
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2 Answers2

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Some bosons are force carriers as you have already noticed, however, a boson is defined as a particle (elementary, composite)that obeys the Bose-Einstein statistics (has integer spin).

In fact, we know a boson that is not a force carrier: the Higgs boson. Of course there are other composite bosons that aren't force carriers like the mesons.

Also, some bosons are force carriers because in the framework of quantum field theory they appear as propagators which mediate the interaction between particles. Some intuition about this can be built by reading about the Feynman diagrams.

1LoopCorrection
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  • If a "force carrier" is something that appears as a propagator in a diagram, then the higgs boson should count as one shouldn't it (everything would at that point) – QCD_IS_GOOD May 27 '22 at 04:22
  • @JoshuaLin yes, An off mass shell Higgs boson in a feyman diagram would have a dp/dt . , – anna v May 27 '22 at 04:29
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I'm confused. I thought bosons were force carrying - e.g. a photon, gluon, etc?

The term "boson" and "fermion" define the spin of the quantum particle, integer for bosons, half integer for fermions. All such particles when modeled in a quantum field theory can carry a force, a $dp/dt$, where $p$ is the momentum.

Photons, gluons and W's are gauge bosons, characterizing the potential entering in the quantum mechanical differential equations, as I discuss here.

anna v
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  • IMHO the concept of force should be used very carefully (if at all) when talking about processes in QFT. So yes you can of course look at the initial momenta and the final momenta and say that since the initial and final (asymptotic) momenta of the respective particles changed. But there is no continuous change d$p/$d$t$ (hence force) we could make sense of using perturbative QFT (and speaking about high energy scattering processes). – AlmostClueless May 27 '22 at 08:46