Posted by Steve Simon on January 24, 2013, 5:06 pm, in reply to "Re: diverging interaction"
Well, neglecting the issue that atoms made of photons don't exist, the principle is correct --- for ideal bosons you can just keep putting more and more bosons in the same place without increasing the energy.
Another interesting example is that you can take a single muon (which is a fermion with the same charge as an electron) and try to put it on top of an atom (electrons and protons). It is easier to put the muon on top of the atom than it is to put another electron on top of the atom. The reason is that the muon and the electrons in the atom are not identical particles so they do not have to obey the Pauli principle with respect to each other. Another electron would have to go in a higher energy eigenstate than all the electrons already there, but the muon can go into a ground state. If you added a second muon, it would have to be in a different eigenstate from the first muon, but the muons and electrons don't have to be orthogonal.
(These statements negelct coulomb interaction, both electrons and muons are negatively charged particles so they still avoid each other somewhat, but the Pauli principle is not involved).
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