Volume 476 - 42nd International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP2024) - Computing and Data Handling
New ways to access PDG data
J. Beringer
Full text: pdf
Pre-published on: December 17, 2024
Published on: April 29, 2025
Abstract
In recent years, the data published by the Particle Data Group (PDG) in the Review of Particle Physics has primarily been accessed on the PDG web pages and in pdgLive, or downloaded in the form of PDF files. A new set of tools (PDG API) makes PDG data easily accessible in machine-readable format and includes a REST API that allows downloading of data in JSON format from pdgLive pages, a Python API, and downloadable database files containing the PDG data.

To find desired information, users either navigate to the corresponding review article or section in Particle Listings or Summary Tables on the web, use the new PDG API, or rely on a Google-based search of the PDG website. Large Language Models (LLM) combined with semantic search and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) are expected to allow enhancing the searching of PDG information in order to provide fine-grained accurate results.

We present the new PDG API, give examples of its use, and discuss a prototype implementation of a new PDG search tool.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22323/1.476.1023
How to cite

Metadata are provided both in article format (very similar to INSPIRE) as this helps creating very compact bibliographies which can be beneficial to authors and readers, and in proceeding format which is more detailed and complete.

Open Access
Creative Commons LicenseCopyright owned by the author(s) under the term of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.