General-purpose event generators for LHC physics

By Andy Buckley, J. Butterworth, S. Gieseke, David Grellscheid, S. Höche, H. Hoeth, F. Krauss, L. Lonnblad, E. Nurse, P. Richardson and 5 more. 2011

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We review the physics basis, main features and use of general-purpose Monte Carlo event generators for the simulation of proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. Topics included are: the generation of hardscattering matrix elements for processes of interest, at both leading and nextto-leading QCD perturbative order; their matching to approximate treatments of higher orders based on the showering approximation; the parton and dipole shower formulations; parton distribution functions for event generators; non-perturbative aspects such as soft QCD collisions, the underlying event and diractive processes; the string and cluster models for hadron formation; the treatment of hadron and tau decays; the inclusion of QED radiation and beyond-Standard-Model processes. We describe the principal features of the Ariadne, Herwig++, Pythia 8 and Sherpa generators, together with the Rivet and Professor validation and tuning tools, and discuss the physics philosophy behind the proper use of these generators and tools. This review is aimed at phenomenologists wishing to understand better how parton-level predictions are translated into hadron-level events as well as experimentalists wanting a deeper insight into the tools available for signal and background simulation at the LHC.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f0fcfbe05766a6ae2404ed4ac1e27e07582655d9

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Citations in the corpus

First combination of Tevatron and LHC measurements of the top-quark mass (2014, background): “1”
Event generation with Sherpa 2.2 (2019, background): “Please note, for more detailed and pedagogical reviews of general Monte Carlo event generation techniques and their practical implementations we refer interested readers to [4,46,47].”
Tuning PYTHIA 8.1: the Monash 2013 tune (2014, background): “5 GeV (for the Monash 2013 tune), we find it reasonable that the p⊥ kicks involved in string breaking should effectively average over dynamics in roughly the range 250 MeV = √κ/π < σ⊥ < pT min, with the lower bound given by Fermi motion (with κ the string tension, see [34]).”
String formation beyond leading colour (2015, background): “Traditionally, Monte Carlo event generators make use of the leading-colour (LC) approximation to trace the colour flow on an event-by-event basis (see [3, 26]), leading to partonic final states in which each quark is colour-connected to a single (unique) other parton in the event (equivalent to a le”
Herwig 7.0/Herwig++ 3.0 release note (2015, background): “Similarly, the arguments presented in [2,43] that the scale used in the strong coupling for a branching should be the rel-”
A perturbative framework for jet quenching (2012, background): “However, it is worth noting that the choices of t ≈ θ2 and t ≈ k2 ⊥ emerge as better suited when inspecting the radiation pattern of two subsequent emissions since they better capture effects related to the emergence of destructive interference in non-angular-ordered emissions [4, 59, 60].”