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 composite quantum states, which means it must obey the Pauli exclusion principle and Fermi-Dirac statistics. They have half-integer spin. Among them are many elementary particles, most derived from quarks. Compare boson.

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

[After Enrico Fermi.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Enrico Fermi (Italian-American physicist) + -on.

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Examples

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • The phase here is between a heavy fermion and light fermions in an anti-ferromagnetic state.

    Searching for Life in the Multiverse | Universe Today 2010

  • 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.

    First Collisions for the LHC | Universe Today 2009

  • 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.

    First Collisions for the LHC | Universe Today 2009

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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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