Decision Theory for the Mass Measurements at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams

TL;DR

This paper proposes using the Kullback-Leibler divergence to evaluate the information gained from nuclear mass measurements at FRIB, optimizing experimental choices for nuclear physics and astrophysics.

Contribution

It introduces a method to quantify information gain from mass measurements using Kullback-Leibler divergence from two different modeling perspectives.

Findings

Kullback-Leibler divergence effectively measures information gain.

The approach helps prioritize measurements for maximum scientific benefit.

Applicable to other facilities for optimizing experimental strategies.

Abstract

Nuclear physics facilities, like the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), can potentially perform many nuclear mass measurements of exotic isotopes. Each measurement comes with a particular cost, both in time and money, and thus it is important to establish which mass measurements are the most informative. In this article, we show that one can use the Kullback-Leibler divergence to determine the information gained by a mass measurement. We model the information gain obtained by nuclear mass measurements from two perspectives: first from the perspective of theoretical nuclear mass models, and the second from the perspective of r-process nucleosynthesis. While this work specifically analyzes the abilities of FRIB, other facilities worldwide could benefit from a similar use of information gain in order to decide which experiments are optimal.