Alec Aivazis edited Intro.tex  over 9 years ago

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Since they were first introduced in 1948, Feynman diagrams have been the go to representation 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 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 onto their computer 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 and exporting production-ready diagrams with as little effort by the user as possible. The only prerequisite in order to fully benefit from the application is to download the LaTeX drawing package that is used by the system. system if the diagram is to be exported to LaTeX.  \footnote{This package is available for download at feynman.aivazis.com/package as well as when the diagram is successfully exported to LaTeX.}