Crystal Ball function

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Examples of the Crystal Ball function.
Examples of the Crystal Ball function.

The Crystal Ball function, named after the Crystal Ball Collaboration (hence the capitalized initial letters), is a probability density function commonly used to model various lossy processes in high-energy physics. It consists of a Gaussian core portion and a power-law low-end tail, below a certain threshold. The function itself and its first derivative are both continuous.

The Crystal Ball function is given by:

f(x;\alpha,n,\bar x,\sigma) = N \cdot \begin{cases} \exp(- \frac{(x - \bar x)^2}{2 \sigma^2}), & \mbox{for }\frac{x - \bar x}{\sigma} > -\alpha \\ A \cdot (B - \frac{x - \bar x}{\sigma})^{-n}, & \mbox{for }\frac{x - \bar x}{\sigma} \leqslant -\alpha \end{cases}

where

A = (\frac{n}{\left| \alpha \right|})^n \cdot \exp(- \frac {\left| \alpha \right|^2}{2}),

B = \frac{n}{\left| \alpha \right|} - \left| \alpha \right|,

N is a normalization factor and α, n, \bar x and σ are parameters which are fitted with the data.

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