In particle physics, a fermion (named after Enrico Fermi) is any particle which obeys the Fermi–Dirac statistics and follows the Pauli exclusion principle, which would include all quarks and leptons, as well as any composite particle made of an odd number of these, such as all baryons and many atoms and nuclei. Fermions contrast with bosons which obey Bose–Einstein statistics.

A fermion can be an elementary particle, such as the electron; or it can be a composite particle, such as the proton. The spin-statistics theorem holds that, in any reasonable relativistic quantum field theory, particles with integer spin are bosons, while particles with half-integer spin are fermions.

In contrast to bosons, only one fermion can occupy a particular quantum state at any given time. If more than one fermion occupies the same physical space, at least one property of each fermion, such as its spin, must be different. Fermions are usually associated with matter, whereas bosons are generally force carrier particles; although in the current state of particle physics the distinction between the two concepts is unclear.

Sankar Das Sarma ( /ˈʃæŋkɑr dæʃ ˈʃɑrmə/) is an Indian-born American theoretical condensed matter physicist, who has worked in the areas of strongly correlated materials, graphene, semiconductor physics, low-dimensional systems, topological matter, quantum Hall effect, nanoscience, spintronics, collective properties of ultra-cold atomic and molecular systems, optical lattice, many-body theory, and quantum computation.

Das Sarma is the Richard E. Prange Chair in Physics [1], a Distinguished University Professor [2], a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), and the Director of the Condensed Matter Theory Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he has been on the physics faculty since 1980. Das Sarma has co-authored [3] more than 500 articles in the Physical Review Journal series of the American Physical Society, including more than 100 publications in Physical Review Letters, and with more than 24,000 citations to his publications, is one of the Institute for Scientific Information Highly-Cited Researchers.

Roman W. Jackiw (b. 1939) is a theoretical physicist and Dirac Medallist. Born in Poland, Jackiw received his PhD from Cornell University in 1966 under Hans Bethe and Kenneth Wilson. He has been a professor at MIT Center for Theoretical Physics since 1969.

Jackiw is famous for the discovery of the so-called axial anomaly, also known as Adler-Bell-Jackiw anomaly, also known as the Chiral anomaly. In 1969, Roman Jackiw and John Stewart Bell published their explanation, which was later expanded and clarified by Stephen L. Adler, of the (observed) decay of a neutral pion into two photons. This decay is forbidden by a symmetry of classical electrodynamics, but Bell and Jackiw showed that this symmetry cannot be preserved at the quantum level. Their introduction of an "anomalous" term from quantum field theory required that the sum of the charges of the elementary fermions had to be zero. This work also gave important support to the color-theory of quarks. Jackiw is also known for Jackiw–Teitelboim gravity also called the "R=T model".

Ady Stern is an Israeli physicist and a Professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He is best known for his research relating to the theoretical aspects of the fractional quantum Hall effect and the properties of quasiparticles that have one-quarter the charge of an electron.

David Ceperley is a computational physicist. He received the Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics. The Aneesur Rahman prize is the highest honor given by the American Physical Society for work in computational physics. He has done pioneering work on the development and application of the path integral Monte Carlo method for quantum many-body systems, such as superfluid helium and hydrogen under extreme conditions.

The Tanatar-Ceperley exchange-correlation functional is named after him and Bilal Tanatar (currently at Bilkent University in Turkey).

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