boson
Americannoun
noun
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Any of a class of elementary or composite particles, including the photon, pion, and gluon, that are not subject to the Pauli exclusion principle (that is, any two bosons can potentially be in the same quantum state). The value of the spin of a boson is always an integer. Mesons are bosons, as are the gauge bosons (the particles that mediate the fundamental forces). They are named after the physicist Satyendra Nath Bose.
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Compare fermion See Note at elementary particle See Table at subatomic particle
Etymology
Origin of boson
1945–50; named after S. N. Bose (1894–1974), Indian physicist; see -on 1
Compare meaning
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Explanation
A boson is a nuclei with an even mass number. Bosons are subatomic particles. An atom isn’t the smallest thing in the world: there are also subatomic particles, such as bosons. Bosons get their name from Indian physicist S. N. Bose, who first described their behavior. If you want to understand bosons thoroughly, you'd better take a class in in particle physics. In a nutshell, a boson has a symmetric wave-function, therefore obeying Bose-Einstein statistics but not the Pauli exclusion principle. Physicists study bosons to understand how the universe works at the tiniest level.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
The Z bosons examined in the experiment came from the decay of a Higgs boson, the particle discovered at the LHC in 2012.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 20, 2026
It is based on the documentary of the same name about the discovery of the Higgs boson — the “God particle” — at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 28, 2026
Among the names read out was Prof Peter Higgs, the British theorist who, nearly half a century earlier, had predicted the existence of a particle believed to hold the cosmos together – the Higgs boson.
From BBC ● Mar. 17, 2026
The 27-kilometre proton-smashing ring, running about 100 metres below France and Switzerland, has, among other things, been used to prove the existence of the Higgs boson.
From Barron's ● Jan. 27, 2026
The Higgs boson may or may not actually exist; it was invented simply as a way of endowing particles with mass.
From "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson
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