MFV approach to robust estimate of neutron lifetime

Jiang Zhang; Sen Zhang; Zhen-Rong Zhang; Pu Zhang; Wen-Bin Li; Yan Hong

doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-022-11071-9

2022 Impact factor 4.4

Particles and Fields

Open Access

Eur. Phys. J. C (2022) 82: 1106
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-022-11071-9

Regular Article - Experimental Physics

MFV approach to robust estimate of neutron lifetime

Jiang Zhang¹^,2^,3^a, Sen Zhang¹, Zhen-Rong Zhang², Pu Zhang¹, Wen-Bin Li¹ and Yan Hong¹^f

¹ Physics Experimental Center, Department of Mathematics and Physics, Hebei GEO University, 050016, Shijiazhuang, China
² School of Basic Sciences, Tianjin Agricultural University, 300384, Tianjin, China
³ Hebei Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Information and Geo-detection Technology, Hebei GEO University, Shijiazhuang, China

^a zhangphysics@126.com
^f hongyandemail@163.com

Received: 14 September 2022
Accepted: 23 November 2022
Published online: 7 December 2022

Abstract

Aiming at evaluating the lifetime of the neutron, we introduce a novel statistical method to analyse the updated compilation of precise measurements including the 2022 dataset of Particle Data Group (PDG). Based on the minimization for the information loss principle, unlike the median statistics method, we apply the most frequent value (MFV) procedure to estimate the neutron lifetime, irrespective of the Gaussian or non-Gaussian distributions. Providing a more robust way, the calculated result of the MFV is s with statistical bootstrap errors, while the result of median statistics is s according to the binomial distribution. Using the different central estimates, we also construct the error distributions of neutron lifetime measurements and find the non-Gaussianity, which is still meaningful.

© The Author(s) 2022

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