The Dalitz plot is a scatterplot often used in particle physics to represent the relative frequency of various (kinematically distinct) manners in which the products of certain (otherwise similar) three-body decays may move apart. A scatterplot or scatter graph is a graph used in statistics to visually display and compare two sets of related quantitative, or numerical, data by displaying only finitely many points, each having a coordinate on a horizontal and a vertical axis. ... Particles erupt from the collision point of two relativistic (100 GeV) gold ions in the STAR detector of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. ... Frequency can refer to: Frequency, measurement of signal wave cycles Frequency, a 2000 film starring Dennis Quaid FreQuency, a music video game FM4 Frequency Festival, an Austrian music festival In statistics, the (statistical) frequency of an event is the number of times the event occurred in the experiment or the...

It serves to distinguish and to quantify whether and which fraction of those decays proceeded either resonantly as a (generally very rapid) succession of two-body decay stages, or non-resonantly, i.e. directly into the three decay products. In physics, resonance is the tendency of a system to absorb more oscillatory energy when the frequency of the oscillations matches the systems natural frequency of vibration (its resonant frequency) than it does at other frequencies. ...

R.H. Dalitz introduced this technique in 1953 to study decays of K mesons (which at that time were still referred to as "tau-mesons"). It can be adapted to the analysis of four-body decays as well. The neutral Kaons are symmetric and antisymmetric mixtures of the quark combinations down-antistrange and antidown-strange. ...

References

• R.H. Dalitz, Phil. Mag.44, 1068 (1953).
• E. Fabri, Nuovo Cimento11, 479 (1954).