The WHIZARD Event Generator

The Generator of Monte Carlo Event Generators for LHC, ILC and other High Energy Physics Experiments

Current release

WHIZARD 2: Version 2.0.3. has been released on August 10th, 2010.
The distribution tarball of the sources can be found here.
Note that two of the features of WHIZARD 1 (Photon collider spectra and pT distributions for lepton collider ISR) have not yet been re-enabled. These features are foreseen for version 2.0.4.

Before installing WHIZARD, you should check the note on compilers and the page on possible build problems in the WHIZARD Wiki.

The manual for WHIZARD 2 is not yet completed. We regularly update the version from the distributions here (last update: 2010-08-10). You can find a few worked physics examples in the WHIZARD Wiki.

You may also want to inspect the latest news and the list of changes.

WHIZARD 1: The sources for version 1.95 can be found here. Note that with version 1.94 the development of new features in version 1 stops; there will be only bug fixes from now on. Look at this link for installation instructions. The manual is available in HTML and in PostScript and PDF formats. Note that the manual needs (and will get) a major update.

Service for archaeologists and regression testers: old sources are kept here and here.

What is WHIZARD?

WHIZARD is a program system designed for the efficient calculation of multi-particle scattering cross sections and simulated event samples.

Tree-level matrix elements are generated automatically for arbitrary partonic processes by using the Optimized Matrix Element Generator O'Mega. Matrix elements obtained by alternative methods (e.g., including loop corrections) may be interfaced as well. The program is able to calculate numerically stable signal and background cross sections and generate unweighted event samples with reasonable efficiency for processes with up to eight final-state particles; more particles are possible. For more particles, there is the option to generate processes as decay cascades including complete spin correlations.

Polarization is treated exactly for both the initial and final states. Final-state quark or lepton flavors can be summed over automatically where needed. For hadron collider physics, an interface to the standard LHAPDF is provided. For Linear Collider physics, beamstrahlung (CIRCE) and ISR spectra are included for electrons and photons. The events can be written to file in standard formats, including ASCII, STDHEP, the Les Houches event format (LHEF) or HepMC. These event files can then be showered and hadronized.

Currently, WHIZARD supports the Standard Model (optionally, with anomalous couplings), the MSSM, the NMSSM, Little Higgs models, Z' models, UED, and supports gravitinos and gravitons. Model extensions or completely different models can be added. There is also an interface to FeynRules.

The WHIZARD team, contact, funding

WHIZARD has been written by Wolfgang Kilian, Thorsten Ohl, and Jürgen Reuter.

Further members of the WHIZARD team are: Fabian Bach (U. Würzburg), Hans-Werner Boschmann (U. Siegen), Christian Speckner (U. Freiburg), Sebastian Schmidt (U. Freiburg), Daniel Wiesler (U. Freiburg)

Contact:

The current versions are 2.0.3 (Aug 10th, 2010) and 1.95 (Feb 25th, 2010).

The WHIZARD project is a part of the Strategic Helmholtz Alliance Physics at the Terascale. We are furthermore supported or have been supported in earlier stages of this work by the German Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), the German Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), and the Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur (MWK) of the state Baden-Württemberg.

REFERENCES

If you use WHIZARD, please cite the following publications

W. Kilian, T. Ohl, J. Reuter, WHIZARD: Simulating Multi-Particle Processes at LHC and ILC , arXiv: 0708.4233 [hep-ph]
M. Moretti, T. Ohl, J. Reuter, O'Mega: An Optimizing matrix element generator , LC-TOOL-2001-040-rev, arXiv: hep-ph/0102195-rev.

There is also the older write-up for WHIZARD 1:

W. Kilian, WHIZARD Manual 1.0, LC-TOOL-2001-039, http://www-flc.desy.de/lcnotes/. This document is identical to the manual of version 1.0.

DEVELOPMENT version (SVN trunk)

You can also access our subversion repository at http://svn.hepforge.org/whizard/trunk for checking out (pun intended!) the current sources. Note, that the svn contains the latest developer version. In order to be able to compile the svn version, one has to first generate the configure script out of the file configure.ac by running autoreconf (NOT autoconf) which is part of the autoconf/automake http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf and http://www.gnu.org/software/automake package. Furthermore, the development version also needs the noweb tools to be installed on the system in order to extract the source codes and documentation from several so called .nw files. The noweb package can be downloaded and installed from here: http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/noweb .

O'Mega is WHIZARD's matrix element generator

The tarball for the O'Mega matrix element generator as a stand-alone tool you can find here.

VAMP is WHIZARD's adaptive multi-channel integrator

The tarball for the VAMP integration package as a stand-alone tool you can find here.

CIRCE1 is WHIZARD's generator for lepton collider beamstrahlung

The tarball for the CIRCE1 package as a stand-alone tool you can find here.

Examples of WHIZARD usage:

A standard reference of SUSY cross sections can be found here.

Back to www.event-generator.org.

This WWW page is brought to you by Wolfgang Kilian, Jürgen Reuter and Thorsten Ohl.

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