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IMAGE: Fermions with different spins (indicated by arrows) behave like bosons in three dimensions when the number of spin components increases.
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Credit: HKUST
In the text book of quantum mechanics, it was introduced that bosons and fermions, two types of elementary particles that build the universe, behave in a drastically different way. For example, bosons can share the same quantum state while fermions of the same kind cannot but fill available quantum states one by one.
Nevertheless, modern developments in condensed matter physics and high energy physics have suggested that the boundary between bosons and fermions can be blurred. One of such examples is a gas of multi-flavor fermions, each identified by a different spin (indicated by arrows in Figure), in which any two flavors interact with one another by the same interaction. Multi-flavor fermions with such a SU(N) symmetry are expected to behave like an ensemble of spinless bosons when the number of different spins in the system becomes very large. The researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and the Purdue university use quantum simulation to explore such a "bosonization" phenomenon with ultracold fermions in three dimensions.