boson

thumb|upright=1.6|The class of Bosons is one of the two fundamental classes of subatomic particle, the other being [[fermions. All subatomic particles must be one or the other. A composite particle (hadron) may fall into either class depending on its composition.]]

In particle physics, a boson ( ) is a subatomic particle whose spin quantum number has an integer value (0, 1, 2, ...). The class of bosons is one of the two fundamental classes of subatomic particle, the other being fermions, which have half odd-integer spin (1/2, 3/2, 5/2, ...). Every observed subatomic particle is either a boson or a fermion. Paul Dirac coined the term boson to classify the fundamental particles that obey Bose–Einstein statistics, the quantum framework pioneered by Satyendra Nath Bose.