Tuning Pythia for Forward Physics Experiments

TL;DR

This paper develops a specialized Pythia tune for forward physics at the LHC, improving predictions in the forward region by tuning to LHCf data and providing uncertainty estimates for future studies.

Contribution

A new Pythia forward physics tune with enhanced beam remnant modeling, tuned to LHCf data, and including a data-driven uncertainty estimate for forward physics applications.

Findings

Improved agreement with forward region measurements

Provides uncertainty estimates for flux predictions

Demonstrates application to neutrino and dark photon spectra

Abstract

Event generators like Pythia play an important role in physics studies at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). While they make accurate predictions in the central region, i.e. at pseudorapidities $\eta<5$, a disagreement between Pythia and measurements in the forward region, $\eta>7$, has been observed. We introduce a dedicated forward physics tune for the Pythia event generator to be used for forward physics studies at the LHC, which uses a more flexible modelling of beam remnant hadronization and is tuned to available particle spectra measured by LHCf. Furthermore, we provide an uncertainty estimate on the new tune in a data-driven way which can be used as a means of flux uncertainty for future forward physics studies. We demonstrate an application of our tune by showing the updated neutrino and dark photon spectra at the FASER experiment.