Using decaylanguage to get the decay channels of a particle

Santi Vallés

unread,

Aug 13, 2018, 11:57:10 AM8/13/18

to Scikit-HEP forum

Hi everyone,

Let me introduce myself, I am a physics undergraduate student (graduating next year) in the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain). In July I participated in an internship at the Insitute for High Energy Physics in my university where, together with other two undergraduate students, we worked to develop a Python program that simulates the decay of a particle, using Processing to show this phenomenon in an attractive way for the general public. (https://github.com/IFAE/particle-muzic)

To achieve this goal we wanted to use a package that could give us the decay channels of each particle and their quantum numbers, but we couldn't find any. For this reason I contacted some of you a month ago, to see if there was anything in SciKit-hep that could give us this information. Eduardo and Jim gave me then the idea of using the .DEC file from LHCb, and some days later Henry included in Scikit-hep his decaylanguage library, which can give us the quantum numbers that we need, and he is now working to include there a parser for the .DEC file.

What we would need from decaylanguage is a list of the possible decays of a given particle and their branching ratios, so that we can choose one of them through a weighted choice and then show on the screen the resulting particles.

It would also be nice to have the opposite. Given a list of particles, a method could return a list of the particles that can decay into them. We could use this to predict which particles are candidates to be virtual particles participating in some of the decays.

I open this thread to ask for your opinion about all this, and to see if you can think about any other functionality concerning the decay channels that would be interesting to include.

Best wishes,

Santi Vallés

Eduardo Rodrigues

unread,

Oct 5, 2018, 10:21:40 AM10/5/18

to Santi Vallés, Scikit-HEP forum

Hi Santi,

It’s been a long while since we have not exchanged emails. How is the project going? Have you seen that Henry Is working on substantially improving decaylanguage, parsing decay files via a Lark parser see https://github.com/scikit-hep/decaylanguage/pull/12? Work will resume soon here ...

Once the parser will be up and running, it will be very easy to do the kind of things you want (me too, BTW 😉), such as getting the list of possible decays to a given final state, with the (visible) branching fractions. Keep an eye on this if you want to discuss the API and even contribute with functionality. Henry and I have discussed some of the functionality/API to get to, but that’s dependent on the parser. Stay in touch and touned – this is not forgotten.

Thanks,

Eduardo

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Scikit-HEP forum" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to scikit-hep-for...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to scikit-h...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/scikit-hep-forum/e77197ff-884b-4a1b-83f4-6e9b4b805ce9%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Virus-free. www.avast.com

Santi Vallés

unread,

Oct 14, 2018, 3:12:04 PM10/14/18

to Eduardo Rodrigues, scikit-h...@googlegroups.com

Hi Eduardo,

Thanks for the update and sorry for taking so much time to reply. As this was just a summer project and I have already began the final year of my bachelor degree I don't have much time for it. But as I have really enjoyed working on it this summer I might do something from time to time just for fun. Of course I will keep an eye on what you do with decaylanguage and I will post issues on Github if any idea that might be useful for both of us comes to mind.