Alec Aivazis edited Intro.tex  over 9 years ago

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\section{Introduction}  Since they were first introduced in 1948, Feynman diagrams have been the go to representation for constructing of  mathematical expressions commonly found in high energy physics. For a while, high quality diagrams were only necessary for publications and due to the popularity of LaTeX as a typesetting tool, the most commonly used tools to create these diagrams were packages written for the LaTeX environment.\footnote{The UK List of TeX Frequently Asked Questions provides four possibilities for drawing Feynman diagrams in LaTeX: feynman, axodraw, feynmf, and feyn.} While this did allow for an extremely portable representation, the description of the these  drawings can be rather cryptic to someone who is not intimately familiar with the package. To combat this, Lukas Theussl developed a standalone application known as JaxoDraw which provides a graphical interface for constructing the diagrams and exporting it to various formats, including LaTeX. The major drawback to JaxoDraw is that it requires the user to download the application and have a version of Java installed on their computer which is compatible with the one the application was compiled with.  The web application at feynman.aivazis.com is an attempt to provide the quality of diagrams that is producible by similar packages with the ease of use and portability that is found only on the web. By allowing the user to create diagrams at any Internet-connected device, feynman aims to be a complete solution for producing production-ready diagrams with as little effort by the user as possible.  1. For awhile there was only LaTeX and print, so Feynmp and Feynmf were good enough but very clunky. Then JaxoDraw came along and provided a user interface for creating feynman diagrams.