Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Any of a class of particles having a spin that is half an odd integer and obeying the exclusion principle, by which no more than one identical particle may occupy the same quantum state. The fermions include the baryons, quarks, and leptons.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun any particle that obeys Fermi-Dirac statistcs and is subject to the Pauli exclusion principle.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
particle with totally antisymmetric compositequantum states, which means it must obey the Pauli exclusion principle and Fermi-Dirac statistics. They have half-integerspin . Among them are many elementary particles, most derived fromquarks . Compareboson .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun any particle that obeys Fermi-Dirac statistics and is subject to the Pauli exclusion principle
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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At low energies the Higgs gets a vacuum expectation value, and acts like a mass term, converting the left-handed fermion into a right-handed fermion, which is what you want.
Dark Matter and Fifth Forces Sean 2008
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The paper laid the basis for describing one of the two categories of the elementary particles that make up an atom - one was boson, and the other came to be known as fermion, after the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.
IBN Top Headlines 2008
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Assuming that this is no error, then the term "fermion" is ambiguous between elementary particle and composite particle.
Walter Kohn and Density-Functional Theory Horace Jeffery Hodges 2005
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The phase here is between a heavy fermion and light fermions in an anti-ferromagnetic state.
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The existence of the superpartner to the Higgs and the fermion field at about the same mass scale results in the cancellation of these divergences.
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So a Higgs field that couples to the fermion field f and its conjugate f-bar according to an interaction term in the Lagrangian ~ f-barHf, will carry the Higgs divergence as well.
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It think these internal fermion degrees of freedom behave as Landau electrons around a quantum critical point.
Einstein Still Rules, Says Fermi Telescope Team | Universe Today 2009
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Also, one assumes the duality accounts for the discrete spectrum of possible fermion rest masses (perhaps corresponding to a discrete spectrum of possible closed black hole assemblies?)
Science and Unobservable Things Sean 2008
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The mass scale characterizing each Kaluza-Klein tower can be chosen independently for each species of scalar, fermion, or gauge boson.
Aether Compactification Sean 2008
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In that language there is no fermion propagator and no Higgs insertion - the effect of the Higgs has been summed into our definition of the massive fermion.
Dark Matter and Fifth Forces Sean 2008
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Pauli and others soon realized that this empirical rule of exclusion applied not only to electrons but to a broader class of particles, including protons and neutrons, which they called fermions.
Physicists describe exotic ‘paraparticles’ that defy categorization Davide Castelvecchi 2025
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Pauli and others soon realized that this empirical rule of exclusion applied not only to electrons but to a broader class of particles, including protons and neutrons, which they called fermions.
Physicists describe exotic ‘paraparticles’ that defy categorization Davide Castelvecchi 2025
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The retraction is a setback for this approach to quantum computing, but scientists say it should still be possible to create and study the exotic states, known as Majorana fermions, that were the subject of the research.
Evidence of elusive Majorana particle dies — but computing hope lives on Davide Castelvecchi 2025
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Theoretical physicists have predicted that in certain materials, the collective behaviour of electrons can display the properties of Majorana fermions, hypothetical elementary particles that could simultaneously be matter and antimatter.
Evidence of elusive Majorana particle dies — but computing hope lives on Davide Castelvecchi 2025
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