Pythia 8, the C++ rewrite of the commonly-used Pythia event generator, is now available in a first full-fledged version 8.1. The older Pythia 6.4 generator in Fortran 77 is still maintained, for now, but users are strongly recommended to try out and move to the new version as soon as feasible.
The evolution of the widely-used PYTHIA particle physics event generator is outlined, from the early days to the current status and plans. The key decisions and the development of the major physics components are put in context.
Event generators play a crucial role in the exploration of LHC physics. This presentation summarizes news and plans for the three general-purpose pp generators HERWIG, PYTHIA and SHERPA, as well as briefer notes on a few other generators. Common themes, such as the matching and merging between matrix elements and parton showers, are highlighted. Other topics include a historical introduction, from the Lund perspective, and comments on the role of MCnet.
The PYTHIA program can be used to generate high-energy-physics 'events' with sets of outgoing particles produced in the interactions between two incoming particles. The objective is to provide a representation, as accurate as possible, of event properties in a wide range of reactions. One such reaction, that is not well understood is Diffraction. Among the several alternative approaches that have been proposed, in PYTHIA, we follow a fairly conventional Pomeron based one, but fully integrated to use the standard PYTHIA machinery for multiple interactions, parton showers and hadronization. This…
We report an underlying event tune for the PYTHIA 8 Monte Carlo event generator that is applicable for hadron collisions primarily at $\sqrt{s}$ ranges available at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC). We compare our new PYTHIA 8 tuned predictions to mid-rapidity inclusive $π^{\pm}$ spectra, jet sub-structure, Drell-Yan production, and underlying event measurements from RHIC and the Tevatron, as well as underlying event data from the Large Hadron Collider. With respect to the default PYTHIA 8 Monash Tune, the new `Detroit' tune shows significant improvements in the description of the ex…
In the era of precision physics measurements at the LHC, efficient and exhaustive estimations of theoretical uncertainties play an increasingly crucial role. In the context of Monte Carlo (MC) event generators, the estimation of such uncertainties traditionally requires independent MC runs for each variation, for a linear increase in total run time. In this work, we report on an automated evaluation of the dominant (renormalization-scale and non-singular) perturbative uncertainties in the PYTHIA 8 event generator, with only a modest computational overhead. Each generated event is accompanied b…
We discuss the result with full mass dependence for the virtual NNLO QCD corrections to the W boson pair production in the quark-anti-quark annihilation channel. We also report on our progress regarding the treatment of the double-real radiative corrections which, along with the virtual-real corrections, are the other two necessary ingredients for a theoretical prediction of the total cross section for W+ W- production to NNLO accuracy.
Employing an approach based on the Green functions of Landau-gauge QCD, some selected results from a calculation of meson and baryon properties are presented. A rainbow-ladder truncation to the quark Dyson-Schwinger equation is used to arrive at a unified description of mesons and baryons by solving Bethe-Salpeter and covariant Faddeev equations, respectively.
We give a status report on the theory of resummed quantum gravity. We recapitulate the use of our resummed quantum gravity approach to Einstein's general theory of relativity to estimate the value of the cosmological constant as $ρ_Λ=(0.0024{\mathrm{eV}})^4$. The estimate is made in the context of the Planck scale cosmology formulation of Bonanno and Reuter. We discuss the constraints on susy GUT models that follow from the closeness of the estimate to experiment. Various consistency checks on the calculation are addressed and we use the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to remove a large part …
There is ample evidence, dating as far back as Low's theorem, that the universality of soft emissions extends beyond leading power in the soft energy. This universality can, in principle, be exploited to generalise the formalism of threshold resummations beyond leading power in the threshold variable. In the past years, several phenomenological approaches have been partially successful in performing such a resummation. Here, we briefly review some recent developments which pave the way to a solution of this problem, at least for electroweak annihilation processes.
We present 9 new tunes of the pT-ordered shower and underlying-event model in PYTHIA 6.4. These "Perugia" tunes update and supersede the older "S0" family. The data sets used to constrain the models include hadronic Z0 decays at LEP, Tevatron minimum-bias data at 630, 1800, and 1960 GeV, Tevatron Drell-Yan data at 1800 and 1960 GeV, and SPS min-bias data at 200, 546, and 900 GeV. In addition to the central parameter set, called "Perugia 0", we introduce a set of 8 related "Perugia Variations" that attempt to systematically explore soft, hard, parton density, and colour structure variations in …
At the present time, there are discrepancies with the predictions of the SM in several observables involving $b \to s \ell^+ \ell^-$ and $b \to c \ell^- {\barν}_\ell$ decays. These are the $B$ flavour anomalies. In this review, we summarize the data as of Moriond 2021 and present theoretical new-physics explanations from both a model-independent effective-field-theory point of view and through the building of explicit models. Throughout, we stress the complementarity of these two approaches. We also discuss combined explanations of both $B$ anomalies, and present models that also explain other…
We discuss unquenching of the three-gluon vertex via its Dyson-Schwinger equation. We review the role of Furry's theorem and present first results for the quark triangle diagrams using non-perturbatively calculated dressing functions for the quark propagator and the quark-gluon vertex.
This is a status report of the WHIZARD Monte Carlo multi-purpose event generator given at the LCFORUM 2012 at DESY. I review here the development of the WHIZARD generator version 2 with a special emphasis on linear collider physics. In case you use the program, please do cite the official reference(s).
The India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) is a proposed underground facility located in India that will primarily house the magnetised Iron CALorimeter (ICAL) detector to study atmospheric neutrinos produced by interactions of cosmic rays with Earth's atmosphere. The physics goal is to to make precision measurements of the neutrino mixing and oscillation parameters through such a study. We present here the results from detailed simulations studies, as well as a status report on the project. In particular, we highlight the sensitivity of ICAL to the open issue of the neutrino mass ordering, wh…
In these proceedings I review the status of an ongoing project that aims at solving the quark propagator Dyson-Schwinger equation in the complex domain. The novel aspect of the approach is that the non-analyticities arising throughout the iteration of the equation are to be taken into account in an appropriate way through dynamic contour deformation. Because of the complexity of the approach, these studies are undertaken in a heavily truncated scenario that serves as a toy model for the development of the numerical techniques that are required to treat the system in a mathematically sound way.
The current status of the QUAX R\&D program is presented. QUAX is a feasibility study for a detection of axion as dark matter based on the coupling to the electrons. The relevant signal is a magnetization change of a magnetic material placed inside a resonant microwave cavity and polarized with a static magnetic field.
In this article, we briefly review the recent progress related to extracting the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) specific shear viscosity from the flow data measured at Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
We report the current status of $\varepsilon_K$, the indirect CP violation parameter in the neutral kaon system, evaluated using the lattice QCD inputs. We use lattice QCD to fix $\hat{B}_K$, $ξ_0$, $ξ_2$, $|V_{us}|$, $m_c(m_c)$, and $|V_{cb}|$. Since Lattice 2015, FLAG updated $\hat{B}_K$, exclusive $V_{cb}$ has been updated with new lattice data in the $\bar{B}\to D\ellν$ decay channel, and RBC-UKQCD has updated $ξ_0$ and $ξ_2$. Our preliminary results show that the standard model evaluation of $\varepsilon_K$ with exclusive $|V_{cb}|$ (lattice QCD inputs) has $3.2σ$ tension with the experim…
Although they do not address the hierarchy problem, models with Universal Extra Dimensions have attracted a lot of attention as simple benchmark models characterized by small mass splittings and a dark matter WIMP played by the Lightest Kaluza-Klein particle (LKP). We review their status, with emphasis on the minimal implementation in 5 dimensions (MUED) in which the LKP is a massive hypercharge gauge boson. In this case, the mass range accounting for the correct dark matter abundance (around 1.4 TeV) remains untouched by LHC8 and is out of reach of present DM direct detection experiments. How…
We review the current status of the global DGLAP analysis of nuclear parton distribution functions, nPDFs, focusing on the recent EPS09 analysis, whose output, EPS09NLO, is the best-constrained NLO nPDF set on the market. Collinear factorization is found to work very well in the kinematical region studied. With the error sets released in the EPS09 package one can compute how the nPDF-related uncertainties propagate into factorizable nuclear hard-process cross sections. A comparison with the other existing NLO nPDF sets is shown, and the BRAHMS forward-$η$ hadron data from d+Au collisions are d…