Soft-QCD and UE spectra in pp collisions at very high CM energies (a Snowmass white paper)

We make some educated guesses for the extrapolations of typical soft-inclusive (minimum-bias, pileup, underlying-event) observables to proton-proton collisions at center-of-mass energies in the range 13 - 100 TeV. The numbers should be interpreted with (at least) a 10% uncertainty.Comment: 5 pages. Update (v2) adds numbers for 13 TeV and corrects bug in UE ET density estimate

QCD (&) Event Generators

Recent developments in QCD phenomenology have spurred on several improved approaches to Monte Carlo event generation, relative to the post--LEP state of the art. In this brief review, the emphasis is placed on approaches for 1) consistently merging fixed--order matrix element calculations with parton showers, 2) improving the parton shower algorithms themselves, and 3) improving the description of the underlying event in hadron collisions.Comment: Submitted to proceedings of DIS05, 12 page

A Quick Guide to SUSY Tools

The last decade has seen the emergence of a wide range of automated calculations for supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model. This guide contains a brief summary of these, with the main focus on hadron collider phenomenology, as well as a brief introduction to the so-called SUSY Les Houches Accord. See also the Les Houches Web Repository for BSM Tools: http://www.ippp.dur.ac.uk/montecarlo/BSM/Comment: 6 pages. Prepared for the TeV4LHC Physics Landscapes summary repor

QCD and γ γ\gamma\,\gamma studies at FCC-ee

The Future Circular Collider (FCC) is a post-LHC project aiming at searches for physics beyond the SM in a new 80--100~km tunnel at CERN. Running in its first phase as a very-high-luminosity electron-positron collider (FCC-ee), it will provide unique possibilities for indirect searches of new phenomena through high-precision tests of the SM. In addition, by collecting tens of ab$^{-1}$ integrated luminosity in the range of center-of-mass energies $\sqrt{s}$~=90--350~GeV, the FCC-ee also offers unique physics opportunities for precise measurements of QCD phenomena and of photon-photon collisions through, literally, billions of hadronic final states as well as unprecedented large fluxes of quasireal $\gamma$'s radiated from the $\rm e^+e^-$ beams. We succinctly summarize the FCC-ee perspectives for high-precision extractions of the QCD coupling, for detailed analyses of parton radiation and fragmentation, and for SM and BSM studies through $\gamma\gamma$ collisions.Comment: 6 pages, Proceedings ICHEP'16 (Chicago

Non-perturbative QCD Effects and the Top Mass at the Tevatron

The modelling of non-perturbative effects is an important part of modern collider physics simulations. In hadron collisions there is some indication that the modelling of the interactions of the beam remnants, the underlying event, may require non-trivial colour reconnection effects to be present. We recently introduced a universally applicable toy model of such reconnections, based on hadronising strings. This model, which has one free parameter, has been implemented in the Pythia event generator. We then considered several parameter sets (`tunes'), constrained by fits to Tevatron minimum-bias data, and determined the sensitivity of a simplified top mass analysis to these effects, in exclusive semi-leptonic top events at the Tevatron. A first attempt at isolating the genuine non-perturbative effects gave an estimate of order +-0.5GeV from non-perturbative uncertainties. The results presented here are an update to the original study and include recent bug fixes of Pythia that influenced the tunings investigated.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, Submitted to the Proceedings of Top2008, 18-24 May 2008, La Biodola, Isola d'Elba, Ital

A framework for second-order parton showers

A framework is presented for including second-order perturbative corrections to the radiation patterns of parton showers. The formalism allows to combine O(alphaS^2)-corrected iterated 2->3 kernels for "ordered" gluon emissions with tree-level 2->4 kernels for "unordered" ones. The combined Sudakov evolution kernel is thus accurate to O(alphaS^2). As a first step towards a full-fledged implementation of these ideas, we develop an explicit implementation of 2->4 shower branchings in this letter.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure

String Formation Beyond Leading Colour

We present a new model for the hadronisation of multi-parton systems, in which colour correlations beyond leading $N_C$ are allowed to influence the formation of confining potentials (strings). The multiplet structure of $SU(3)$ is combined with a minimisation of the string potential energy, to decide between which partons strings should form, allowing also for "baryonic" configurations (e.g., two colours can combine coherently to form an anticolour). In $e^+e^-$collisions, modifications to the leading-colour picture are small, suppressed by both colour and kinematics factors. But in $pp$ collisions, multi-parton interactions increase the number of possible subleading connections, counteracting their naive $1/N_C^2$ suppression. Moreover, those that reduce the overall string lengths are kinematically favoured. The model, which we have implemented in the PYTHIA 8 generator, is capable of reaching agreement not only with the important \left(n_\mathrm{charged}) distribution but also with measured rates (and ratios) of kaons and hyperons, in both $ee$ and $pp$ collisions. Nonetheless, the shape of their $p_\perp$ spectra remains challenging to explain.Comment: 48 pages, 22 figure

A Brief Introduction to PYTHIA 8.1

The PYTHIA program is a standard tool for the generation of high-energy collisions, comprising a coherent set of physics models for the evolution from a few-body hard process to a complex multihadronic final state. It contains a library of hard processes and models for initial- and final-state parton showers, multiple parton-parton interactions, beam remnants, string fragmentation and particle decays. It also has a set of utilities and interfaces to external programs. While previous versions were written in Fortran, PYTHIA 8 represents a complete rewrite in C++. The current release is the first main one after this transition, and does not yet in every respect replace the old code. It does contain some new physics aspects, on the other hand, that should make it an attractive option especially for LHC physics studies.Comment: 27 page