Intended for advanced undergraduates and graduate students this book is apractical guide to the use of probability and statistics in experimentalphysics. The em... » 

Intended for advanced undergraduates and graduate students this book is apractical guide to the use of probability and statistics in experimentalphysics. The emphasis is on applications and understanding on theorems andtechniques actually used in research. The text is not a comprehensive text inprobability and statistics proofs are sometimes omitted if they do notcontribute to intuition in understanding the theorem. The problems some withworked solutions introduce the student to the use of computers occasionalreference is made to routines available in the CERN library but other systemssuch as Maple can also be used. Topics covered include basic conceptsdefinitions some simple results independent of specific distributionsdiscrete distributions the normal and other continuous distributionsgenerating and characteristic functions the Monte Carlo method and computersimulations multidimensional distributions the central limit theoreminverse probability and confidence belts estimation methods curve fitting andlikelihood ratios interpolating functions fitting data with constraintsrobust estimation methods. This second edition introduces a new method fordealing with small samples such as may arise in search experiments when thedata are of low probability. It also includes a new chapter on queuing problemsincluding a simple but useful buffer length example. In addition newsections discuss over and undercoverage using confidence belts the extendedmaximumlikelihood method the use of confidence belts for discretedistributions estimation of correlation coefficients and the effectivevariance method for fitting y fx when both x and y have measurement errors. «