Observation of bosonic coalescence and fermionic anti-coalescence with indistinguishable photons

TL;DR

This paper reports experimental observations of photons exhibiting both bosonic coalescence and fermionic anti-coalescence behaviors, challenging traditional symmetry expectations for indistinguishable particles.

Contribution

It demonstrates that photons can display fermionic anti-coalescence under certain conditions, revealing new quantum behavior beyond standard bosonic symmetry.

Findings

Photons can exhibit fermionic anti-coalescence.

Indistinguishable photons can show fermionic behavior.

Experimental evidence of mixed symmetry behaviors.

Abstract

The symmetrization postulate asserts that the state of particular species of particles can only be of one permutation symmetry type: symmetric for bosons and antisymmetric for fermions. We report some experimental results showing that pairs of photons indistinguishable by all degrees of freedom can exhibit not only a bosonic behavior, as expected for photons, but also a surprisingly sharp fermionic behavior under specific conditions.