Shannon entropy and particle decays

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method using Shannon entropy to quantify the informational significance of new particle decay channels, aiding the understanding of decay distributions and the impact of discoveries.

Contribution

It applies Shannon entropy to particle decay distributions, providing a quantitative measure of the information gained from new decay channels.

Findings

Entropy quantifies the importance of new decay channels.

The method allows subdivision of decay distributions for detailed analysis.

Examples demonstrate the practical application to known decay data.

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.