 | This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. (March 2012) |
In physics and particularly in particle physics, a multiplet is the state space for 'internal' degrees of freedom of a particle, that is, degrees of freedom associated to a particle itself, as opposed to 'external' degrees of freedom such as the particle's position in space. Examples of such degrees of freedom are the spin state of a particle in quantum mechanics, or the color, isospin and hypercharge state of particles in the Standard model of particle physics. Formally, we describe this state space by a vector space which carries the action of a group of continuous symmetries.