From Florence to Fermions: a historical reconstruction of the origins of Fermi's statistics one hundred years later

TL;DR

This paper traces the historical development of Fermi's statistics, highlighting how Fermi applied the Exclusion Principle to ideal gases, shaping quantum statistical mechanics.

Contribution

It provides a detailed historical analysis of Fermi's early work and the conceptual origins of Fermi-Dirac statistics, emphasizing its foundational role in quantum physics.

Findings

Fermi's interest in entropy and quantization influenced his statistical work.

Fermi applied the Exclusion Principle to non-interacting particles.

The work established a new quantum statistical framework.

Abstract

Aim of this paper is to retrace the path that led the young Enrico Fermi to write his paper on the statistics of an ideal monatomic gas. This discovery originated in his interest, which he had shown since his formative years, in the absolute entropy constant and in the problems he highlighted in Sommerfeld's quantization in the case of identical particle systems. The fundamental step taken by Fermi in writing his work on statistics was to apply the Exclusion Principle, formulated for electrons in an atom and which could therefore have been a pure effect due to dynamics, to a system of non-interacting particles.