Model discrimination in pseudoscalar-meson photoproduction

Article history: Received 8 March 2016 Received in revised form 22 April 2016 Accepted 21 May 2016 Available online 26 May 2016 Editor: V. Metag To learn about a physical system of interest, experimental results must be able to discriminate among models. We introduce a geometrical measure to quantify the distance between models for pseudoscalarmeson photoproduction in amplitude space. Experimental observables, with finite precision, map to probability distributions in amplitude space, and the characteristic width scale of such distributions needs to be smaller than the distance between models if the observable data are going to be useful. We therefore also introduce a method for evaluating probability distributions in amplitude space that arise as a result of one or more measurements, and show how one can use this to determine what further measurements are going to be necessary to be able to discriminate among models. © 2016 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP3.