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Generating Feynman Diagrams and Amplitudes with FeynArts 3

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Submitted 20 Dec 2000 · 12 references

Pith's verdict: A solid, honest program paper for a tool people actually use; the one real mismatch is the abstract's SUSY claim against a body that ships no SUSY example.

T0 · AI review

How this review was made: An AI referee (selfhosted/deepseek-v4.1-flash) read the paper on October 29, 2026 and answered a fixed list of questions about it. T0 is the starting level every paper gets. The levels describe how deeply Pith has checked the paper, never the authors.

  1. T0 AI review An AI read the paper and answered a fixed list of questions.
  2. T1 Audit Automatic checks that the references and files the paper relies on exist and match.
  3. T2 Compute The paper's code or calculations re-run with the same results.
  4. T3 Formal statement The claims written out in a formal math language a computer can read.
  5. T4 Proof Those claims proved, and the proof checked by computer.

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· 3 major objections · 7 minor · Ask about this paper · The compiled record · Read the full review →
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arXiv IDhep-ph/0012260 (version 2)
Pith IDTKFKNZIL, Pith's permanent record of this paper and its review
CitationT. Hahn. "Generating Feynman Diagrams and Amplitudes with FeynArts 3." arXiv:hep-ph/0012260 (2000). https://pith.science/paper/TKFKNZIL
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Referee report
The paper

The paper claims

FeynArts 3 generates Feynman diagrams at three levels of field detail, inserts model-allowed particles into them, and emits both publication-quality LaTeX or PostScript figures and symbolic amplitudes.

The reading

Particle physicists compute predictions by drawing Feynman diagrams, the little pictures of particles splitting, merging and looping, and then turning each picture into an algebraic expression. For anything beyond the simplest process the number of diagrams explodes, and drawing them by hand is slow and error-prone. FeynArts automates the first half of that job inside Mathematica. The program works in three steps. First it enumerates every distinct graph shape with the requested number of loops and external legs, starting from a small library of loop-only seeds and attaching legs one at a time. Second it fills each shape with actual particles, keeping only combinations whose couplings exist in a model file. Third it applies the Feynman rules from that model file and returns a symbolic amplitude, with the generic kinematic structure kept separate from the model-specific constants so that the expensive algebra is done once. Two design choices matter. Fields are handled at three levels of detail (generic fermion, down-type quark, b quark), which lets a user stop the expansion early and sum over generations later in a faster language. And fermion lines are oriented by a flipping rule rather than by following fermion number, which is what allows Majorana fermions and their fermion-number-violating couplings to be handled at all. The version 3 additions are mostly graphical: a custom PostScript prologue, a matching LaTeX style file, and a Java editor for arranging diagram layouts with a mouse. The paper is documentation for a working tool rather than a physics result.
Extended reading notes

Core claim

FeynArts 3 generates, for a requested number of loops and external legs, the set of distinct Feynman topologies, inserts model-allowed fields into them at three levels of detail, and applies the Feynman rules to produce symbolic amplitudes, with publication-quality PostScript or LaTeX output for the diagrams (abstract:s1, Sections 2 and 3.1 to 3.5). If correct, a user can go from a process specification to a full one-loop 2 to 2 amplitude set in about a minute of compute, with no hand drawing and no hand transcription of vertices.

Load-bearing premise

That the diagram set produced by InsertFields is exactly the set the model allows. The insertion routine works by intersecting lookup tables built at model-initialization time from the user's model file (Section 3.3), and the paper reports no cross-check of diagram counts, symmetry factors, or amplitudes against an independent generator such as QGRAF [4] or GRACE [5], which it names as comparable. Any error in the model file or in the lookup-table construction propagates silently into every downstream amplitude, and the paper's only worked example, Z to b bbar, is not compared to a published result.

Original abstract

This paper describes the Mathematica package FeynArts used for the generation and visualization of Feynman diagrams and amplitudes. The main features of version 3 are: generation of diagrams at three levels, user-definable model files, support for supersymmetric models, and publication-quality Feynman diagrams in PostScript or LaTeX.

The compiled record

The paper's own sentences, arranged, kept beside the review and separate from it. Each label is drawn from a closed vocabulary; the number beside it is the probability the classifier gave that label. Numbers in the tables are the authors', checked by code. No sentence in this record was written by a model.

Compiled by classifier-1.13-20260917 via OpenRouter, question bank abstract-p1-20260923, 2026-09-23: 1 request, 2,314 input tokens, $0.0001 reported.

What the abstract itself states, as probabilities: claims first 0.03 · states limitation 0.04 · human participants 0.02 · controlled comparison 0.01 · randomized assignment 0.01 · states quantitative result 0.08 · compares with prior results 0.04 · mentions code or data availability 0.23.

The abstract, sentence by sentence

arXiv listing abstract v2. Results and the main claim are underlined; .

This paper describes the Mathematica package FeynArts used for the generation and visualization of Feynman diagrams and amplitudes. The main features of version 3 are: generation of diagrams at three levels, user-definable model files, support for supersymmetric models, and publication-quality Feynman diagrams in PostScript or LaTeX.

background contribution method result interpretation main claim

What the classifier reports for each sentence. The number is the probability it gave the label.
#sentencerolethe authors' own workstates the main conclusionstrength
s0 This paper describes the Mathematica package FeynArts used for the generation and visualization of Feynman diagrams and amplitudes. contribution 0.95 0.53 0.17 asserted 1.00
s1 The main features of version 3 are: generation of diagrams at three levels, user-definable model files, support for supersymmetric models, and publication-quality Feynman diagrams in PostScript or LaTeX. contribution 0.90 0.56 0.14 asserted 1.00

What kind of paper the classifier reports this is: method or tool 1.00 · evidence from simulation or computation 0.53.

What was examined, and what was not

sources read
  • arXiv listing abstract v2
not examined
  • full text
  • figures and tables
  • references and citing sentences
  • relations to other papers
levels run
  • P abstract
not run
  • S sections
  • T body sentences
  • C citations
  • R cross-paper relations

Every quoted sentence on this record is the authors'. Every label is from Pith's closed vocabulary, with the probability shown beside it. Every number in the measurements table is the authors', checked by code. Record as JSON

Figures
Figure 1. Flowchart for the generation of Feynman amplitude
Figure 2. The algorithm of CreateTopologies, shown for a one-loop starting topology to which two external legs are added. The leg added in each step is drawn with a thick line. The fields, their propagators, and their couplings are defined in a special file, the model file, which the user can supply or modify. The following model files are included in FeynArts: the electroweak Standard Model (SM.mod) [11], the same including QCD (SMQCD.mod), and in the background-field formulation (SMbgf.mod) [12]. These model files all include the full set of one￾loop counter terms. A model file for the…

Figures reproduced from arXiv:hep-ph/0012260 by the authors.

References
How later papers used it

919 later papers cite it

Evidence: substantial. 912 of the citing papers share no author with it, and 843 of those carry a confident label from Pith's citation classifier.

Pith read 40 of the 1,015 citing sentences, choosing only those whose citation markers point at this paper alone, and wrote the paraphrases from them. The summary, the counts, the evidence level, the links and the quotes come from code; the summary counts the papers listed below. A later paper is listed under a label when Pith's citation classifier gives one of its sentences that label at probability 0.8 or more (0.95 for support), Pith's reading finds that the citing paper itself did it, and a second check confirms the paraphrase against the sentence. This section lists uses only. It does not list criticism or disagreement, so their absence here says nothing about how the paper has been received. Papers that share an author with this one are listed apart, under "By the same authors". A quote is the citing authors' own sentence, shown when their paper's licence is CC BY, CC BY-SA or CC0. JSON

Uses its method or tool 40 of 837 papers with this label · 2 by the same authors

By the same authors

How the literature uses it

847 arXiv papers cite this in 936 sentences

Each citing sentence is taken from the citing paper's LaTeX source and typed by Pith's classifier. A label appears at probability 0.8 or more (0.95 for support), a contest at 0.7 or more; the quoted words are the citing authors'. How each label was checked · JSON

Papers citing it · 70 sentences without a confident label

Uses its method or tool 772 papers
Compares with it 14 papers
Cites it as background 13 papers
  • Nowadays we are able to perform precision predictions in the SM for a vast number of observables as a result of the automation of one-loop QCD [ref] and electroweak (EW) [ref] corrections.

    Recola2: REcursive Computation of One-Loop Amplitudes 2 · Introduction · 0.87

  • Although fully automatic computer programs are not available yet for higher loop calculations, several program packages have been developed, e.g. Caravel [ref] , pySecDec [ref] and AMFlow [ref] , FeynArts [ref] , Qgraf [ref] , FeynCalc [ref] , Pacakge-X [ref] , FormCalc [ref] , tapir [ref] , ALibrary[<https://magv.github.io/alibrary>], etc, where the computer algebra systems (CAS) such as Mathematica[A commercial software available at <https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica>.] and Form [ref] are widely used.

    FeAmGen.jl: A Julia Program for Feynman Amplitude Generation · Introduction · 0.82

  • With one-loop amplitudes being available since a long time, more recently much effort has been spent on the automation of one-loop corrections, which are more important than ever in view of the recent progress in multi-loop calculations. corrections are nowadays available in various approaches, [ref] , [ref] , [ref] , / [ref] , and in our fully recursive approach [ref] .

    NLO electroweak corrections in extended Higgs Sectors with RECOLA2 · Introduction · 0.94

Discussion

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