English

Shannon entropy and hadronic decays

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2017-10-04 v1

Abstract

How much information is added to the Review of Particle Physics when a new decay branching ratio of a hadron is measured and reported? This is quantifiable by Shannon's information entropy S(i)=fBR(if)logBR(if)S(i) =-\sum_{f}BR_{(i\longrightarrow f)}\log BR_{(i\longrightarrow f)} that takes as input the experimental branching ratios (BR) of the decay distribution of particle i. It may be used at two levels, against the distribution of decay-channel probabilities, or against the distribution of individual quantum-state probabilities (integrating the phase space of those states provides the former). We illustrate the concept with some examples.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1710.01286,
  title  = {Shannon entropy and hadronic decays},
  author = {Felipe J. Llanes-Estrada and Pedro Carrasco Millán and Ana Porras Riojano and Esteban M. Sánchez García and M. Ángeles García Ferrero},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.01286},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

Proceedings of the EPS-HEP 2017, European Physical Society conference on High Energy Physics, 5-12 July 2017, Venice, Italy. 1+3 pages, 7 plots

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:02:43.329Z