Shannon entropy and particle decays
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
2018-05-23 v2 High Energy Physics - Experiment
Nuclear Theory
Abstract
We deploy Shannon's information entropy to the distribution of branching fractions in a particle decay. This serves to quantify how important a given new reported decay channel is, from the point of view of the information that it adds to the already known ones. Because the entropy is additive, one can subdivide the set of channels and discuss, for example, how much information the discovery of a new decay branching would add; or subdivide the decay distribution down to the level of individual quantum states (which can be quickly counted by the phase space). We illustrate the concept with some examples of experimentally known particle decay distributions.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1802.05487,
title = {Shannon entropy and particle decays},
author = {Pedro Carrasco Millan and M. Angeles Garcia-Ferrero and Felipe J. Llanes-Estrada and Ana Porras Riojano and Esteban M. Sanchez Garcia},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.05487},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
12 pages, 18 plots; to appear in Nuclear Physics B