Parton showers for LHC physics and documentation of big simulation codes

por Juan José López Villarejo (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and IPhT-CEA)

martes 12 nov. 2013 12:00 → 13:00 Europe/Brussels

Seminar Room 1.1.1 (IFIC)

VINCIA is a Monte Carlo parton shower, which aims to provide a fast and precise simulation of high-energy proton-proton collisions at LHC. It is a plug-in to PYTHIA 8, currently under development. Parton showers provide an approximation to the all-orders perturbative QCD series. The basic underlying algorithm is analogous to radioactive decay, with a certain ‘splitting probability’ that corresponds to the ‘decay probability per unit time’. Modern parton showers also allow matching to exact fixed-order calculations (Leading Order and Next-to Leading Order). There is a considerable knowledge gap between the algorithm as explained in the papers and the actual workings of the code. In VINCIA, we aim to document the code through high-level activity diagrams (flowcharts) in order to bridge this gap. These diagrams will be generated automatically from special comments written alongside the c++ code by the developers. This is akin to Doxygen documentation, but incorporates knowledge of the execution flow.

Slides 2013Nov-IFIC-Valencia-LopezVillarejo.pdf