The use of nested sampling in the extraction of polarisation observables at CLAS

Abstract

The extraction of polarisation observables from photoproduction experiments provides an insight into the spectrum of nucleon resonances and the "missing resonance" problem. Experiments carried out at JLab, Mainz and Bonn cover a wide range of reactions, which will soon result in the first "complete measurement" in pseudoscalar meson photoproduction. Traditionally, these measurements have been analysed using frequentist statistics, where parameters are extracted by fitting distributions. An alternative method is the application of Bayesian statistics, where any existing knowledge about the results can be used in the initial conditions. One such application of this is nested sampling. This work discusses nested sampling and how it can be applied to the extraction of spin observables.