Shannon entropy and hadronic decays

Abstract

How much information is added to the Review of Particle Physics when a new decay branching ratio of a hadron is measured and reported? This is quantifiable by Shannon's information entropy $S(i)=-{\sum }_{f}B{R}_{(i⟶f)}\log B{R}_{(i⟶f)}$ that takes as input the experimental branching ratios (BR) of the decay distribution of particle i. It may be used at two levels, against the distribution of decay-channel probabilities, or against the distribution of individual quantum-state probabilities (integrating the phase space of those states provides the former). We illustrate the concept with some examples.

Comments: Proceedings of the EPS-HEP 2017, European Physical Society conference on High Energy Physics, 5-12 July 2017, Venice, Italy. 1+3 pages, 7 plots