ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Relativistic Breit–Wigner distribution

Imagine you have a jar of jelly beans. Each jelly bean has a different size, and the sizes are spread out in a certain way. Some jelly beans are big and some jelly beans are small. But there's one jelly bean in the jar that's really special - it's the biggest jelly bean in the whole jar. You know it's the biggest jelly bean because it's a different color than all the other jelly beans.

Now imagine that you want to know exactly what size the biggest jelly bean is. You can't just guess - you need to measure it carefully. But when you measure the jelly bean, you find that its size is a little bit different each time you measure it. Sometimes it's a little bit bigger, and sometimes it's a little bit smaller.

This is kind of like the Relativistic Breit-Wigner Distribution. The jelly beans in the jar represent particles, and the different sizes of the jelly beans represent the masses of the particles. The biggest jelly bean represents a special type of particle called a resonance.

The Relativistic Breit-Wigner Distribution is a way of describing how the masses of these particles are spread out. Just like the sizes of the jelly beans are spread out in a certain way, the masses of the particles are spread out in a certain way too.

But just like the biggest jelly bean isn't always exactly the same size every time you measure it, the mass of the resonance isn't always exactly the same every time you measure it. The Relativistic Breit-Wigner Distribution helps us understand how much variation there is in the mass measurement of the resonance.

So, the Relativistic Breit-Wigner Distribution is like a tool we can use to understand how the masses of different particles are spread out, especially when there's a special type of particle called a resonance that has a lot of variation in its mass measurements.