Parton showers for LHC physics and documentation of big simulation codes
por
Juan José López Villarejo
(Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and IPhT-CEA)
→
Europe/Brussels
Seminar Room 1.1.1 (IFIC)
Seminar Room 1.1.1
IFIC
Descripción
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.