The WHIZARD Event Generator

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

Current release

WHIZARD 2: Version 2.0.7. has been released on Mar 19th, 2012. The distribution tarball of the sources can be found here. Note that except for a few minor technical points all features of WHIZARD 1 are fully functional also in WHIZARD 2. 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: 2012-03-19). There is also a HTML version of the manual. You can find a few worked physics examples in the WHIZARD Wiki. The documented source code can be found here. You may also want to inspect the latest news and the list of changes. WHIZARD 1: The sources for version 1.97 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. 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, Jürgen Reuter, and Christian Speckner.

Further members of the WHIZARD team are: Fabian Bach (U. Würzburg), Hans-Werner Boschmann (U. Siegen), Sebastian Schmidt (DESY), Steffen Schwertfeger (U. Siegen), Matthias Trudewind (U. Siegen), Daniel Wiesler (DESY)

Contact:

The current versions are 2.0.7 (Mar 19th, 2012) and 1.97 (May 31st, 2011).

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 , Eur.Phys.J.C71 (2011) 1742, 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 (now deprecated) write-up for WHIZARD 1 (please cite the two references on top):

• 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.

The reference for the WHIZARD-FeynRules interface is:

• N. Christensen, C. Duhr, B. Fuks, J. Reuter, C. Speckner, arXiv: 1010.3251. [hep-ph]

WHIZARD Workshop, DESY, Nov. 21 - 23, 2011: The Indico page can be found here.

DEVELOPMENT version (SVN trunk)

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. Here is the manual/documented source code

VAMP is WHIZARD's adaptive multi-channel integrator

• The tarball for the VAMP integration package as a stand-alone tool you can find here. Here is the manual/documented source code

CIRCE1 is WHIZARD's generator for lepton collider beamstrahlung

• The tarball for the CIRCE1 package as a stand-alone tool you can find here. Here is the manual/documented source code

CIRCE2 is WHIZARD's generator for photon beams from Compton backscattering

• The tarball for the CIRCE2 package as a stand-alone tool you can find here. Here is the manual/documented source code

Examples of WHIZARD usage:

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

Virtual Machine Image for WHIZARD Tutorial

The Virtual Machine Image for the WHIZARD tutorial can be downloaded here or here.

The MD5 checksum is 180e6e0f99e30ff2b2ea3e53afd859a6.

This image contains a debian installation with a working WHIZARD installation in /opt. In order to use it, you have to import the image into VirtualBox (any version > 4.0 should work) using File->Import Appliance. VirtualBox is available for Mac and Windows from www.virtualbox.org ; on linux, it is usually available via your distributions package manager. The passwords for both root and the preconfigured user account (username "tutorial") are set to "changeme314" - you are highly advised to change them. THIS IS A 1.8GB DOWNLOAD, SO PLEASE TRY TO GET IT BEFORE THE TUTORIAL SESSION.

Back to www.event-generator.org.

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