### Gingerbread [Feyn]Men

03Feb08

To my grocery-shopping delight, I discovered some do-it-yourself gingerbread people at Tesco last week. For £1.50, one gets a set of five blank cookies, two tubes of frosting, and some candies. I replaced the candies with Reese’s pieces, the only American confectionary to ever impress my English flatmates. (A recent care-package of peanut butter cups really made them happy.)

I couldn’t help myself from bringing gingerbread [feyn]men to lunch this past week, here’s the latest example:

I was a bit sloppy with indices, but the top diagram is a higgs-production channel while the bototm diagram is the standard model background. Here are the diagrams (without labels):

The initial states are $q, \bar q$, the final states are $b, \bar b, \mu, \nu_\mu$. As an exercise one can fill in the labels.

#### 6 Responses to “Gingerbread [Feyn]Men”

1. 1 robert

Is gingerbread going to join penguin in the lexicon of hep-th whimsy?

2. Ah, excellent! Here in Santa Cruz, the Society of Physics Students took up celebrating Feynman’s birthday last year by making Feynman diagram cupcakes. Gingerbread men look more fit for the job!

3. flip i will be looking forward to when you mention “gingerbread diagram” in one of your papers …

• ## Flip Tomato

I'm a postgraduate, expatriate physics student. RSS Feed.