Quantum chromodynamics possess an additional SU(3) gauge degree of freedom, later called color charge. Han and Nambu noted that quarks might interact via an octet of vector gauge bosons: the gluons. Since free quark searches consistently failed to turn up any evidence for the new particles, and because an elementary particle back then was "defined" as a particle which could be separated and isolated, Gell-Mann often said that quarks were merely convenient mathematical constructs, not real particles. The meaning of this statement was usually clear in context: He meant quarks are confined, but he also was implying that the strong interactions could
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