The aim of this paper is to clarify the conceptual difference which exists
between the interactions of composite bosons and the interactions of elementary
bosons. A special focus is made on the physical processes which are missed when
composite bosons are replaced by elementary bosons. Although what is here said
directly applies to excitons, it is also valid for bosons in other fields than
semiconductor physics. We in particular explain how the two basic scatterings
-- Coulomb and Pauli -- of our many-body theory for composite excitons can be
extended to a pair of fermions which is not an Hamiltonian eigenstate -- as for
example a pair of trapped electrons, of current interest in quantum
information.Comment: 39 pages, 12 figure