In quantum physics, you can put together the symmetric and antisymmetric wave functions of a system of three or more particles from single-particle wave functions. The symmetric wave function looks like this:
And the antisymmetric wave function looks like this:
This asymmetric wave function goes to zero if any two single particles have the same set of quantum numbers
How about generalizing this to systems of N particles? If you have a system of N particles, the symmetric wave function looks like this:
And the antisymmetric wave function looks like this:
The big news is that the antisymmetric wave function for N particles goes to zero if any two particles have the same quantum numbers
