English

First Digit Distribution of Hadron Full Width

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2010-04-22 v1 High Energy Physics - Experiment High Energy Physics - Theory Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability

Abstract

A phenomenological law, called Benford's law, states that the occurrence of the first digit, i.e., 1,2,...,91,2,...,9, of numbers from many real world sources is not uniformly distributed, but instead favors smaller ones according to a logarithmic distribution. We investigate, for the first time, the first digit distribution of the full widths of mesons and baryons in the well defined science domain of particle physics systematically, and find that they agree excellently with the Benford distribution. We also discuss several general properties of Benford's law, i.e., the law is scale-invariant, base-invariant, and power-invariant. This means that the lifetimes of hadrons follow also Benford's law.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1004.3077,
  title  = {First Digit Distribution of Hadron Full Width},
  author = {Lijing Shao and Bo-Qiang Ma},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1004.3077},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

8 latex pages, 4 figures, final version in journal publication

R2 v1 2026-06-21T15:11:43.534Z