RT Journal Article
T1 Shannon entropy and particle decays
A1 Carrasco Millán, Pedro
A1 García-Ferrero, M. Ángeles
A1 Llanes Estrada, Felipe José
A1 Porras Riojano, Ana
A1 Sánchez García, Esteban M.
AB 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.
PB Elsevier science bv
SN 0550-3213
YR 2018
FD 2018-05
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/12241
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/12241
LA eng
NO © 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.
NO Unión Europea. H2020
NO Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO)
NO ICMAT-Severo Ochoa
DS Docta Complutense
RD 13 jul 2025