The GENIE Neutrino Monte Carlo Generator

TL;DR

GENIE is a comprehensive neutrino event generator designed for all nuclear targets and neutrino energies, focusing on the challenging few-GeV range relevant for current neutrino experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a large-scale, validated, object-oriented software system for neutrino interaction simulation across a wide energy spectrum.

Findings

Supports full simulation lifecycle for neutrino experiments

Extensively validated physics models included

Available since 2007 with ongoing updates

Abstract

GENIE is a new neutrino event generator for the experimental neutrino physics community. The goal of the project is to develop a `canonical' neutrino interaction physics Monte Carlo whose validity extends to all nuclear targets and neutrino flavors from MeV to PeV energy scales. Currently, emphasis is on the few-GeV energy range, the challenging boundary between the non-perturbative and perturbative regimes, which is relevant for the current and near future long-baseline precision neutrino experiments using accelerator-made beams. The design of the package addresses many challenges unique to neutrino simulations and supports the full life-cycle of simulation and generator-related analysis tasks. GENIE is a large-scale software system, consisting of 120,000 lines of C++ code, featuring a modern object-oriented design and extensively validated physics content. The first official physics release of GENIE was made available in August 2007, and at the time of the writing of this article, the latest available version was v2.4.4.