What the Particle Data Group is...

AUTHORS of the 2012 RPP edition with address, phone/fax numbers, and email addresses.

Senior physicist and educator Michael Barnett is Head of the Particle Data Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA. Here he discussed the "Review of Particle Physics," a biennially published book outlining the critical issues in physics that help to shape our understanding of the Universe.

Listen: MP3|WMA

Courtesy of sciencewatch.com

The Particle Data Group is an international collaboration charged with summarizing Particle Physics, as well as related areas of Cosmology and Astrophysics. In 2008, the PDG consists of 170 authors from 108 institutions in 20 countries.

The summaries are published in even-numbered years as a now 1340-page book, the Review of Particle Physics, and as an abbreviated version (294 pages), the Particle Physics Booklet. The Review is published in a major journal, and in addition the PDG distributes 16,000 copies of it and 31,000 copies of the Booklet. The Review has been called the bible of particle physics; over the years, it has been cited in 30,000 papers.

The Review includes a compilation and evaluation of measurements of the properties of the elementary particles. In the 2008 Review, the listings include 2,778 new measurements from 645 papers, in addition to 24,559 measurements from 7,104 papers that appeared in earlier editions. Evaluations of these properties are abstracted in summary tables.

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