How bosonic is a pair of fermions?

Abstract

Composite particles made of two fermions can be treated as ideal elementary bosons as long as the constituent fermions are sufficiently entangled. In that case, the Pauli principle acting on the parts does not jeopardise the bosonic behaviour of the whole. An indicator for bosonic quality is the composite boson normalisation ratio $\chi_{N+1}/\chi_{N}$ of a state of $N$ composites. This quantity is prohibitively complicated to compute exactly for realistic two-fermion wavefunctions and large composite numbers $N$. Here, we provide an efficient characterisation in terms of the purity $P$ and the largest eigenvalue $\lambda_1$ of the reduced single-fermion state. We find the states that extremise $\chi_N$ for given $P$ and $\lambda_1$, and we provide easily evaluable, saturable upper and lower bounds for the normalisation ratio. Our results strengthen the relationship between the bosonic quality of a composite particle and the entanglement of its constituents.