The gluon is a member of the family of gauge bosons, which are elementary particles that mediate physical forces.

Since complex scalar fields admit two different kinds of annihilation operators, which are related by conjugation, such fields describe charged bosons.

The word ' force ' is sometimes replaced by ' interaction ' because the fundamental forces operate by exchanging what are now known to be gauge bosons.

The corresponding gauge bosons are the three W bosons of weak isospin from SU ( 2 ) (,, and ), and the B < sup > 0 </ sup > boson of weak hypercharge from U ( 1 ), respectively, all of which are massless.

According to the Standard Model, all elementary particles are either bosons or fermions ( depending on their spin ).

Particles associated with fundamental forces are bosons and they have integer spin.

The spin-statistics theorem holds that, in any reasonable relativistic quantum field theory, particles with integer spin are bosons, while particles with half-integer spin are fermions.

Fermions are usually associated with matter, whereas bosons are generally force carrier particles ; although in the current state of particle physics the distinction between the two concepts is unclear.

In a quantum field theory, there can be field configurations of bosons which are topologically twisted.

These are coherent states ( or solitons ) which behave like a particle, and they can be fermionic even if all the constituent particles are bosons.

This was discovered by Tony Skyrme in the early 1960s, so fermions made of bosons are named Skyrmions after him.

In QED there are two types of particles: electrons / positrons ( called fermions ) and photons ( called gauge bosons ).

Gravitons are postulated because of the great success of quantum field theory ( in particular, the Standard Model ) at modeling the behavior of all other known forces of nature as being mediated by elementary particles: electromagnetism by the photon, the strong interaction by the gluons, and the weak interaction by the W and Z bosons.

Neutral bosons ( photon, Z-boson, and neutral gluons ) are not shown but occupy the diagonal entries of the matrix in complex superpositions

For instance, for a field of free ( non-interacting ) bosons, the total energy of the field is found by summing the energies of the bosons in each energy eigenstate.

The W and Z bosons were discovered experimentally in 1981, and their masses were found to be as the Standard Model predicted.

Some theorists found this objectionable, and so proposed a GUT extension of the weak force which has new, high energy W ' and Z ' bosons which couple with right handed quarks and leptons.

The properties of these pseudo-Goldstone bosons can normally be found by an expansion around the ( exactly ) symmetric theory in terms of the explicit symmetry-breaking parameters.

The result of the efforts of Bose and Einstein is the concept of a Bose gas, governed by Bose – Einstein statistics, which describes the statistical distribution of identical particles with integer spin, now known as bosons.

The existence of the electroweak interactions was experimentally established in two stages, the first being the discovery of neutral currents in neutrino scattering by the Gargamelle collaboration in 1973, and the second in 1983 by the UA1 and the UA2 collaborations that involved the discovery of the W and Z gauge bosons in proton – antiproton collisions at the converted Super Proton Synchrotron.

With the possible exception of gravitation, these interactions can usually be described in a set of calculational approximation methods known as perturbation theory, as being mediated by the exchange of gauge bosons between particles.

They attract or repel each other by exchanging bosons.

The Standard Model of particle physics contains 12 flavors of elementary fermions, plus their corresponding antiparticles, as well as elementary bosons that mediate the forces and the Higgs boson, which was reported on July 4th, 2012, as having been likely detected by the two main experiments at the LHC ( ATLAS and CMS ).

In this diagram, a kaon, made of an up and anti-strange quark, decays both Weak interaction | weakly and strongly into three pion s, with intermediate steps involving a W and Z bosons | W boson and a gluon ( represented by the green spiral ).

It turns out that including left and right-handed 4x4 quaternion matrices is equivalent to including a single right-multiplication by a unit quaternion which adds an extra SU ( 2 ) and so has an extra neutral boson and two more charged bosons.

There are important differences between the statistical behavior of bosons and fermions, which are described by Bose – Einstein statistics and Fermi – Dirac statistics respectively.

Most grand unified theories ( GUTs ) explicitly break the baryon number symmetry, which would account for this discrepancy, typically invoking reactions mediated by very massive X bosons () or massive Higgs bosons ().

Integer spin particles, bosons, are not subject to the Pauli exclusion principle: any number of identical bosons can occupy the same quantum state, as with, for instance, photons produced by a laser and Bose – Einstein condensate.

Supersymmetry pairs bosons with fermions ; therefore every Standard Model particle has a partner that has yet to be discovered.

If the neutrino is a Majorana particle, then we may assume that besides the left-handed neutrino, which couples to its family charged lepton in weak charged currents, there is also a right-handed sterile neutrino partner " NHL ", which is a weak isosinglet and does not couple to any fermions or bosons directly.

Adding or removing bosons from each state is therefore analogous to exciting or de-exciting a quantum of energy in a harmonic oscillator.

The indistinguishability of all particles of each fundamental type ( say, electrons, or photons ) results in the Dirac and Bose quantum statistics which in turn result in the Pauli exclusion principle for fermions and in Bose-Einstein condensation for bosons.

The W bosons have a positive and negative electric charge of 1 elementary charge respectively and are each other's antiparticles.

Elementary particles, whose interactions are described by a gauge theory, interact with each other by the exchange of gauge bosons — usually as virtual particles.

The accelerator was upgraded later to enable production of a pair of W bosons, each having a mass of 80 GeV.

Especially in quantum systems, e. g., a collection of bosons or fermions, the number of particles is an intrinsic property ( rather than an external parameter ) of each quantum state.

For a system of bosons or fermions, it is often mathematically easier to treat the number of particles of the system as an intrinsic property of each quantum ( eigen -) state,.

Delays in the project led to competitive evaluation against a proposal for a much larger machine, eventually called the Superconducting Supercollider, a proton-proton system aimed at 20, 000 + 20, 000 GeV ; while developments in Europe at CERN, including discovery of the W and Z bosons, appeared to make ISABELLE redundant.

Sp ( 8 ) has 32 charged bosons and 4 neutral bosons.

An E < sub > 8 </ sub > gauge group, for example, would have 8 neutral bosons, 120 charged bosons and 120 charged anti-bosons.

Gluons (; ) are elementary particles that act as the exchange particles ( or gauge bosons ) for the strong force between quarks, analogous to the exchange of photons in the electromagnetic force between two charged particles.

Some of the " Goldstone bosons " associated with this spontaneous symmetry breaking are charged under the unbroken gauge group and hence, these composite bosons have a continuous mass spectrum with arbitrarily small masses but yet there is no Goldstone boson with exactly zero mass.

The gauge bosons occur in vector multiplets, the charged matter occurs in chiral multiplets and the Fayet-Ilipolous ( FI ) terms of the various abelian gauge symmetries occur in twisted chiral multiplets.

Fractionally charged quasiparticles are neither bosons nor fermions and exhibit anyonic statistics.

The massive charged W bosons: