[Physics] Do distinguishable fermions obey the Pauli exclusion principle

fermionspauli-exclusion-principlequantum-statistics

We know that fermions are identical particles and obey Pauli exclusion principle. But what is meant by distinguishable fermions? Does that mean, like proton and electron both are fermions but they are distinguishable because of charge? And if we put together both distinguishable fermions, will they obey Pauli exclusion principle ?

Best Answer

The simple way to think about it is to imagine that all fermions are excitations of a single field. These excitations can differ in their position, spin, charge, mass, and so on, and the Pauli exclusion principle applies to all of them. Mathematically, this is just the fact that all fermionic creation operators anticommute; the joint wavefunction of all fermions is antisymmetric.

So fermions that are far apart aren't affected, because they differ in position space. Fermions that have different spins aren't affected, because they differ in spin. And protons and neutrons don't affect each other because they differ in mass and charge. The Pauli exclusion principle always applies and there are no exceptions. Any two fermions must be different in some way to coexist.

Because spin and position are easily changed, and mass and charge aren't, sometimes people break the rule into two cases. They say that Pauli exclusion only looks at spin and position, and doesn't apply to things with different masses and charges (because they're automatically different). This works for simple situations, but it's dangerous, because if you take it too literally you'll get the wrong answer when constructing baryon wavefunctions. There you really do have to antisymmetrize over all degrees of freedom, including the type of quark. You cannot just apply it to each quark flavor individually.

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