Identical Particles

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Identical particles, or indistinguishable particles, are particles that cannot be distinguished from one another, even in principle. Species of identical particles include elementary particles such as electrons, as well as composite microscopic particles such as atoms and molecules. There are two main categories of identical particles: bosons, which can share quantum states, and fermions, which do not share quantum states due to the Pauli exclusion principle. Examples of bosons are photons, gluons, phonons, and helium-4 atoms. Examples of fermions are electrons, neutrinos, quarks, protons and neutrons, and helium-3 atoms. The fact that particles can be identical has important consequences in statistical mechanics. Calculations in statistical mechanics rely on probabilistic arguments, which are sensitive to whether or not the objects being studied are identical. As a result, identical particles exhibit markedly different statistical behavior from distinguishable particles. For example, the indistinguishability of particles has been proposed as a solution to Gibbs' mixing paradox.