A display of three-body final states in two independent pairwise squared invariant masses. For a parent of mass decaying into daughters of masses , four-momentum conservation gives . A narrow intermediate two-body resonance fixes one pairwise invariant mass and appears as a band.
At fixed , use and in the 13-pair rest frame. The endpoint values of its relative cosine give the displayed Dalitz plot boundary. The momenta are fixed by the Källén function; . Integrating gives the invariant-coordinate area, whose phase-space normalization still contains .
After integrating the overall orientation of a scalar-parent three-body decay, the Lorentz-invariant phase space is constant in two pairwise squared invariant masses. The two-body factorization and the relative-angle Jacobian give the displayed density. The event density includes and need not be flat: a resonance produces bands. Identical-particle counting supplies its usual global symmetry factor.
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A Dalitz plot is a graphical representation used in particle physics to visualize the energy and momentum distribution of decay products from a three-body decay process. It is particularly useful for studying the kinematics of interactions involving three particles resulting from the decay of a parent particle. In a Dalitz plot, the axes typically correspond to the invariant masses of pairs of the decay products.