Decision Theory for the Mass Measurements at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams

Abstract: Nuclear physics facilities, like the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), can potentially perform many nuclear mass measurements of exotic isotopes. Each measurement comes with a particular cost, both in time and money, and thus it is important to establish which mass measurements are the most informative. In this article, we show that one can use the Kullback-Leibler divergence to determine the information gained by a mass measurement. We model the information gain obtained by nuclear mass measurements from two perspectives: first from the perspective of theoretical nuclear mass models, and the second from the perspective of r-process nucleosynthesis. While this work specifically analyzes the abilities of FRIB, other facilities worldwide could benefit from a similar use of information gain in order to decide which experiments are optimal.