An Introduction to PYTHIA 8.2

The PYTHIA program is a standard tool for the generation of events in high-energy collisions, comprising a coherent set of physics models for the evolution from a few-body hard process to a complex multiparticle final state. It contains a library of hard processes, models for initial- and final-state parton showers, matching and merging methods between hard processes and parton showers, multiparton interactions, beam remnants, string fragmentation and particle decays. It also has a set of utilities and several interfaces to external programs. PYTHIA 8.2 is the second main release after the complete rewrite from Fortran to C++, and now has reached such a maturity that it offers a complete replacement for most applications, notably for LHC physics studies. The many new features should allow an improved description of data.Comment: 45 page

Light in the beam dump -- ALP production from decay photons in proton beam-dumps

The exploration of long-lived particles in the MeV-GeV region is a formidable task but it may provide us a unique access to dark sectors. Fixed-target facilities with sufficiently energetic and intense proton beams are an ideal tool for this challenge. In this work we show that the production rate of Axion-Like-Particles (ALPs) coupled pre-dominantly to photons receives a significant contribution from daughter-photons of secondary $\pi^0$ and $\eta$ mesons created in the proton shower. We carefully compare the PYTHIA simulated spectra of such secondaries to experimental literature, compute the ALP flux from the Primakoff conversion of these photons, and finally revisit existing limits on ALPs and update the prospects for a set of existing and future searches. Our results show that taking this production mechanism into account significantly enhances the sensitivity compared to previous studies based on coherent ALP production in primary proton-nucleus interactions.Comment: 24 pages, 13 figures, v2 matches version published in JHEP, v3 adds appendix with corrections of some figures of the main text, conclusions unchange

QCD-aware partonic jet clustering for truth-jet flavour labelling

We present an algorithm for deriving partonic flavour labels to be applied to truth particle jets in Monte Carlo event simulations. The inputs to this approach are final pre-hadronization partons, to remove dependence on unphysical details such as the order of matrix element calculation and shower generator frame recoil treatment. These are clustered using standard jet algorithms, modified to restrict the allowed pseudojet combinations to those in which tracked flavour labels are consistent with QCD and QED Feynman rules. The resulting algorithm is shown to be portable between the major families of shower generators, and largely insensitive to many possible systematic variations: it hence offers significant advantages over existing ad hoc labelling schemes. However, it is shown that contamination from multi-parton scattering simulations can disrupt the labelling results. Suggestions are made for further extension to incorporate more detailed QCD splitting function kinematics, robustness improvements, and potential uses for truth-level physics object definitions and tagging

Study on space-time structure of Higgs boson decay using HBT correlation Method in e+^+e−^- collision at s\sqrt{s}=250 GeV

The space-time structure of the Higgs boson decay are carefully studied with the HBT correlation method using e$^+$e$^-$ collision events produced through Monte Carlo generator PYTHIA 8.2 at $\sqrt{s}$=250GeV. The Higgs boson jets (Higgs-jets) are identified by H-tag tracing. The measurement of the Higgs boson radius and decay lifetime are derived from HBT correlation of its decay final state pions inside Higgs-jets in the e$^+$e$^-$ collisions events with an upper bound of $R_H \le 1.03\pm 0.05$ fm and $\tau_H \le (1.29\pm0.15)\times 10^{-7}$ fs. This result is consistent with CMS data.Comment: 7 pages,3 figure

Bottom Production

We review the prospects for bottom production physics at the LHC.Comment: 74 pages, Latex, 71 figures, to appear in the Report of the ``1999 CERN Workshop on SM physics (and more) at the LHC'', P. Nason, G. Ridolfi, O. Schneider G.F. Tartarelli, P. Vikas (conveners

Vincia for Hadron Colliders

We present the first public implementation of antenna-based QCD initial- and final-state showers. The shower kernels are $2\to 3$ antenna functions, which capture not only the collinear dynamics but also the leading soft (coherent) singularities of QCD matrix elements. We define the evolution measure to be inversely proportional to the leading poles, hence gluon emissions are evolved in a $p_\perp$ measure inversely proportional to the eikonal, while processes that only contain a single pole (e.g., $g\to q\bar{q}$) are evolved in virtuality. Non-ordered emissions are allowed, suppressed by an additional power of $1/Q^2$. Recoils and kinematics are governed by exact on-shell $2\to 3$ phase-space factorisations. This first implementation is limited to massless QCD partons and colourless resonances. Tree-level matrix-element corrections are included for QCD up to $\mathcal{O}(\alpha_s^4)$ (4 jets), and for Drell-Yan and Higgs production up to $\mathcal{O}(\alpha_s^3)$ ($V/H$ + 3 jets). The resulting algorithm has been made publicly available in Vincia 2.0

Recent Pythia 8 developments: Hard diffraction, Colour reconnection and γγ\gamma\gamma collisions

An overview of recent developments in \pythia~8 is given. First the new hard diffraction model, which is implemented as a part of the multiparton interactions (MPI) framework, is discussed. Then the new colour reconnection model, which includes beyond leading colour effects that can become important when MPI are present, is briefly reviewed. As a last topic an introduction is given to our implementation of photon-photon collisions. In particular photon PDFs, required modifications for the initial state radiation algorithm and beam remnant handling with photon beams is discussed.Comment: Contribution to proceedings of 7th International Workshop on Multiple Partonic Interactions at the LHC, 23 - 27 November 2015, Miramare, Trieste, Ital