Even though I sometimes read papers in the High Energy Physics - Phenomenology section, I never understood the meaning of phenomenology.
So I finally decided to look it up and found this:
OK, but it doesn’t seem like phenomenology is being used in this way when used in reference to particle physics. The papers are usually concerned with things that are not dependent on human consciousness any more than experiments or theories would be.
So what makes particle physics “phenomenological” rather than experimental or theoretical?
I can’t really help you here, except to describe what a typical course on particle phenomenology goes into. Basically, it’s just a discussion of the properties and behavior of the various particles; learning about the various phenomena they exhibit. This is to be contrasted to experiment in that phenomenology doesn’t tend to resort to much data and to theory in that phenomenology doesn’t tend to involve many equations.
Whether this is how they’re using it at Los Alamos, I couldn’t say.
I’ve never really looked into phenomenological particle physics, but phenomenological models are common in physics. I’ll give you an example from my work.
One of the things I model is the gain of certain types of lasers. These are complicated because of many interactions that occur (coulombic, phonons, photons, etc). Suppose you want to incorporate the coulombic interactions into your model. Theoretically, you would have to consider the physics of this interaction. This can be very complicated. However we know that this basically has the effect of causing certain quantities to decay in time. So instead of using the complicated interaction, the interaction is modelled by essentially multiplying the quantites that will be affected by a decay constant.
Thus we have modelled the coulombic interaction phenomenolgically because we haven’t modelled the physics of the interaction, but the phenomena that it causes. Many engineering models would be considered phenomenlogical.