Hi team,
gh-17505 proposes to add a new continuous distribution to stats, the Relativistic Breit-Wigner distribution, which is used in high energy physics for modeling unstable particles. The addition of this distribution was first suggested in issue gh-6414 by contributor Andrew Fowlie (andrewfowlie), who is a physicist working in the area. Discussion faltered for several years but has picked up again recently.
It has been determined that this is not a reparametrization or transformation of an existing distribution. Particle physicist and developer of relevant statistical software Hans Dembinski (HDembinski) recently provided context and voiced support for its inclusion in gh-6414. Hdembinski also pointed out that there is precedent for including distributions from high energy physics due to scipy.stats.crystalball. This seemed like a fun project to work on and a good excuse to try to refresh some long-faded physics knowledge so I pieced this together.
Feedback is welcome at:
Thanks Albert. The discussion on the issue is quite in-depth and interesting. I think a good case is made for inclusion, and given that multiple maintainers are willing to work on this, that's good enough I'd say. The point that it's only used in some physics subfields is relevant, but should not be the sole determining factor for rejecting a feature, especially if the maintenance cost is fairly low. If it's that useful and there are people willing to implement and review, and most maintainers who weighed in are in favor, that seems good enough to me.
Cheers,
Ralf