Species specification

[DavidSagan]

Here is a proposal for a species specification:

Subatomic particles:

• deuteron
• pion
• antimuon
• proton
• positron
• photon
• electron
• antiproton
• muon
• up
• down
• charm
• strange
• top
• bottom
• electron-neutrino
• muon-neutrino
• tao
• tao-neutrino
• w-boson
• z-boson
• gluon
• higgs-boson
• graviton
• etc...

Atoms and molecules: Use standard chemical notation. Eg: "H20". Isotopes are denoted by a pound symbol "#" followed by the isotopic number followed by the chemical symbol. Eg: "#3He" for Helium-3.

Notes:

1. Here the subatomic names are lower case which I have a slight preference for but only slight.
2. The list of subatomic names is incomplete and will be needed to be expanded.
3. Note that to distinguish the different muon species one needs to look at the charge parameter (which will be 0 or +/- 1). An alternative is to encode this in the species name. Eg: something like "muon+".

Comments?

[jlvay]

David, is there some official website or document online that we can refer to for the standard chemical notation?

[DavidSagan]

Unfortunately not that I am aware of.

[DavidSagan]

Since no one is objecting I am putting this into the draft standard for more discussion and closing this issue.

[RemiLehe]

Sorry, I was late on this one!

Personally, I think that the above specifications would be great in an extension of the standard, but maybe not in the most generic form of the standard. This is because the generic form of the standard tries to be agnostic (as much as possible) of the field of science that it is being used in. The above species specification is somewhat specific to accelerator physics/fundamental physics, while the standard could be used in principle e.g. in cosmology simulations (where the "particle" storage type could be used to store the position of stars/galaxy).

Does the above seem reasonable?

[DavidSagan]

The problem here is that if in the file there is something likespecies = "Higgs", and there is no standard for how species are named, then a program reading the file will not be able to understand what the species is. I think it is fundamental that the openPMD Standard unambiguously defines things like this. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a species naming standard that we can refer to. I would not mind if we took the species name convention I put in the draft Standard and make it a separate document in the repository that is referred to. And if any cosmologists want to use the standard we can always add names to the species list.

[DavidSagan]

@RemiLehe: Sorry I accidentally closed this issue. Reopening now.