Publication: Shannon entropy and particle decays
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Publication Date
2018-05
Authors
Carrasco Millán, Pedro
García-Ferrero, M. Ángeles
Porras Riojano, Ana
Sánchez García, Esteban M.
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Elsevier science bv
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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.
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© 2018 The Authors. Work supported by grants from MINECO FPA2014-53375-C2-1-P and FPA2016-75654-C2- 1-P, ERC Starting Grant 633152, ICMAT-Severo Ochoa project SEV-2015-0554, and carried out in the inspiring atmosphere of the theoretical physics department and UPARCOS. M.A.G.F. acknowledges the Spanish MINECO for a Severo Ochoa FPI contract.