Monte Carlo event generators (MCEGs) are the indispensable workhorses of particle physics, bridging the gap between theoretical ideas and first-principles calculations on the one hand, and the complex detector signatures and data of the experimental community on the other hand. All collider physics experiments are dependent on simulated events by MCEG codes such as Herwig, Pythia, Sherpa, POWHEG, and MG5_aMC@NLO to design and tune their detectors and analysis strategies. The development of MCEGs is overwhelmingly driven by a vibrant community of academics at European Universities, who also train the next generations of particle phenomenologists. The new challenges posed by possible future collider-based experiments and the fact that the first analyses at Run II of the LHC are now frequently limited by theory uncertainties urge the community to invest into further theoretical and technical improvements of these essential tools. In this short contribution to the European Strategy Update, we briefly review the state of the art, and the further developments that will be needed to meet the challenges of the next generation.
In high-energy physics, Monte Carlo event generators (MCEGs) are used to simulate the interactions of high energy particles. MCEG event records store the information on the simulated particles and their relationships, and thus reflects the simulated evolution of physics phenomena in each collision event. We present the HepMC3 library, a next-generation framework for MCEG event record encoding and manipulation, which builds on the functionality of its widely-used predecessors to enable more sophisticated algorithms for event-record analysis. By comparison to previo
We discuss prospects for Monte Carlo event generators incorporating the dynamics of transverse momentum dependent (TMD) parton distribution functions. We illustrate TMD evolution in the parton branching formalism, and present Monte Carlo applications of the method.
Most hadronic event generators which can be used for simulating hadronic and nuclear collisions up to the highest energies are quite similar in their construction and in the underlying theoretical concepts. At energies, where data from accelerator and collider experiments are available the models agree rather well with each other and with the most important features of the data. As soon as we compare the extrapolations of the models at higher energy we find in spite of the similarities in the underlying theoretical concepts quite often striking differences between the predictions of the models.