Exchange interaction independently by physicists Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac in 1926. The exchange interaction is sometimes called the "exchange force". However, it is not a true force and should not be confused with the exchange forces produced by the exchange of force carriers, such as the electromagnetic force produced between two electrons by the exchange of a photon, or the strong force between two quarks produced by the exchange of a gluon. Although sometimes erroneously described as a force, the exchange interaction is a purely quantum mechanical "effect" unlike other forces. Quantum mechanical particles are classified as bosons or fermions. The
Spin (physics) cannot be two identical fermions simultaneously having the same quantum numbers (meaning, roughly, having the same position, velocity and spin direction). In contrast, bosons obey the rules of Bose–Einstein statistics and have no such restriction, so they may "bunch together" even if in identical states. Also, composite particles can have spins different from their component particles. For example, a helium atom in the ground state has spin 0 and behaves like a boson, even though the quarks and electrons which make it up are all fermions. This has some profound consequences: The spin-statistics theorem states (1) that particles with half-integer