Professor
Professor is a tuning tool for Monte Carlo event generators, based on the ideas described in "Tuning and Test of Fragmentation Models Based on Identified Particles and Precision Event Shape Data" (Z. Phys., C73 (1996) 11-60). Fundamentally, the idea of Professor is to reduce the exponentially expensive process of brute-force tuning to a scaling closer to a power law in the number of parameters, while allowing for massive parallelisation and systematically improving the scan results by use of a deterministic parameterisation of the generator's response to changes in the steering parameters. The approach is not limited to MC tuning, but that is the current emphasis of this implementation. Professor system and Py6 tune paperSee the Professor paper, describing the formalism and framework, plus the final write-up of our first round of Pythia 6 tunes to a wide range of e+e- and hadron collider data.MCnet studentships!Would you like to work on a short project involving Monte Carlo event generators? MCnet offers 3-6 month fully funded studentships for current PhD students. See montecarlonet.org for more information! Professor has been successfully used to produce the best existing tunings of the Pythia 6 event generator to data from LEP, JADE, and the Tevatron, encompassing event shapes, fragmentation functions, minimum bias QCD and underlying event studies in QCD jet events at several energies, and leptonic Drell-Yan events from CDF Run II. These tunes help to challenge theoretical models of QCD as implemented in generators, and to understand QCD backgrounds to new experiments, particularly at the LHC. The Professor collaboration is:
Professor is written in Python as a set of command line programs and an underlying library. The Rivet toolkit is used to generate MC data and retrieve experimental reference data (although any compatible source of analysis and reference data can be used.) An overview is given in "Tools for event generator tuning and validation", as well as the Pythia 6 tuning paper linked above. In addition to Rivet, Professor relies on the following pieces of software:
For more information see the Wiki and documentation. No final releases have been published so far. Prospective users who wish to use Professor are encouraged to contact the authors at professor@projects.hepforge.org: we're keen to help you use the system, but a little hands-on advice goes a long way to not getting garbage results ;) |