Precision Tests Find No Violation of Bose Statistics
NOV 01, 1996
Very stable tunable lasers now make it possible to test Bose statistics to a part in a million. The oxygen nucleus has passed the test.
DOI: 10.1063/1.881531
The symmetrization postulate of quantum mechanics asserts that the multiparticle wavefunction for any collection of identical particles must be either wholly symmetric or wholly antisymmetric under the exchange of labels between any two particles. In nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, this postulate is a somewhat ad hoc assumption tacked onto the theory; wholly symmetric or antisymmetric wave functions are not the only ways of preserving the indistinguishability of identical particles.
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© 1996 American Institute of Physics
