First Digit Distribution of Hadron Full Width

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that the first digit distribution of hadron full widths in particle physics follows Benford's law, revealing scale, base, and power invariance properties, and extends this to hadron lifetimes.

Contribution

It is the first systematic investigation showing that hadron widths adhere to Benford's law in particle physics.

Findings

Hadron widths follow Benford's law with high accuracy.

Benford's law properties such as scale, base, and power invariance are confirmed.

Hadrons' lifetimes also follow Benford's law.

Abstract

A phenomenological law, called Benford's law, states that the occurrence of the first digit, i.e., $1,2,...,9$, 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.