Eur. Phys. J. D (2014) 68: 243
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2014-50391-0

Regular Article

Destructive interferences results in bosons anti bunching: refining Feynman’s argument

¹ 8 Galei Tchelet St Herzliya, Israel
² Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Ariel University, 40700 Ariel, Israel

^a e-mail: Avi.Marchewka@gmail.com
^b e-mail: erel@ariel.ac.il

Received: 17 May 2014
Received in final form: 15 June 2014
Published online: 11 September 2014

Abstract

The effect of boson bunching is frequently mentioned and discussed in the literature. This effect is the manifestation of bosons tendency to “travel” in clusters. One of the core arguments for boson bunching was formulated by Feynman in his well-known lecture series and has been frequently used ever since. By comparing the scattering probabilities of two bosons and of two distinguishable particles, he concluded: “We have the result that it is twice as likely to find two identical Bose particles scattered into the same state as you would calculate assuming the particles were different” [R.P. Feynman, R.B. Leighton, M. Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics: Quantum mechanics (Addison-Wesley, 1965)]. This argument was rooted in the scientific community (see for example [C. Cohen-Tannoudji, B. Diu, F. Laloë, Quantum Mechanics (John Wiley & Sons, Paris, 1977); W. Pauli, Exclusion Principle and Quantum Mechanics, Nobel Lecture (1946)]), however, while this sentence is completely valid, as is proved in [C. Cohen-Tannoudji, B. Diu, F. Laloë, Quantum Mechanics (John Wiley & Sons, Paris, 1977)], it is not a synonym of bunching. In fact, as it is shown in this paper, wherever one of the wavefunctions has a zero, bosons can anti-bunch and fermions can bunch. It should be stressed that zeros in the wavefunctions are ubiquitous in Quantum Mechanics and therefore the effect should be common. Several scenarios are suggested to witness the effect.