PYTHIA 6.3 Physics and Manual

TL;DR

PYTHIA 6.3 is a comprehensive Monte Carlo event generator for high-energy physics, modeling complex particle interactions with detailed physics input and customizable features to simulate a wide range of reactions involving strong interactions.

Contribution

This paper provides an extensive description of PYTHIA 6.3, including its physics models, implementation details, and user interface, enabling precise simulation of high-energy particle events.

Findings

Accurate modeling of multihadronic final states.

Inclusion of detailed QCD-based physics models.

Extensive user customization options.

Abstract

The PYTHIA program can be used to generate high-energy-physics `events', i.e. sets of outgoing particles produced in the interactions between two incoming particles. The objective is to provide as accurate as possible a representation of event properties in a wide range of reactions, with emphasis on those where strong interactions play a role, directly or indirectly, and therefore multihadronic final states are produced. The physics is then not understood well enough to give an exact description; instead the program has to be based on a combination of analytical results and various QCD-based models. This physics input is summarized here, for areas such as hard subprocesses, initial- and final-state parton showers, beam remnants and underlying events, fragmentation and decays, and much more. Furthermore, extensive information is provided on all program elements: subroutines and functions, switches and parameters, and particle and process data. This should allow the user to tailor the generation task to the topics of interest.