Per-event significance indicator to visualise significant events

In this note, an alternative for presenting the distribution of significant' events in searches for new phenomena is described. The alternative is based on probability density functions used in the evaluation of the significance’ of an observation, rather than the typical ratio of signal to background. The method is also applicable to searches that use unbinned data, for which the concept of signal to background can be ambiguous. In the case of simple searches using binned data, this method reproduces the familiar quantity $\log (s\mathrm{/}b)$ , when the signal to background ratio is small.