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The WHIZARD Event Generator

The Generator of Monte Carlo Event Generators for Tevatron, LHC, ILC, CLIC, CEPC, FCC-ee, FCC-hh, SppC, the muon collider and other High Energy Physics Experiments

What is WHIZARD?

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

WHIZARD can evaluate NLO QCD corrections in the SM for arbitary lepton and hadron colliders. 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. Different options for QCD parton showers are available.

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), HepMC, or LCIO. These event files can then be hadronized.

WHIZARD supports the Standard Model and a huge number of BSM models. Model extensions or completely different models can be added. WHIZARD fully supports external models from UFO files. There are also legacy interfaces to FeynRules and SARAH.

CURRENT RELEASE

  • The official version is 3.1.5 (released: September 13th, 2024).

    The distribution tarball of the sources can be found here (3.1.5, link).

  • Nightly build tarballs can be downloaded: (link).

  • 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 3 is not yet completed. We regularly update the version from the distributions (last update: 2024-09-13). The manual is available as PDF (link) and HTML (link). You can find a few physics examples in the WHIZARD Wiki. The documented WHIZARD source code can be found here (link). There is also a manual for GAMELAN, the graphics package based on MetaPost for WHIZARD's internal analyses.

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

  • Support is provided through our launchpad site (link), where questions will be answered (link).

  • macOS MacPorts: WHIZARD is available for macOS on MacPorts!

    macOS Darwin >= 10.11: There is a known issue on Darwin >= 10.11 concerning the test suite. Confer the wiki for more information.

  • Prerelease versions, alpha versions, patches, and unofficial versions might be found here (link).

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

The WHIZARD team, contact, funding

WHIZARD has been written by
Wolfgang Kilian (U. Siegen)
Thorsten Ohl (U. Würzburg)
Jürgen Reuter (DESY)

Further members of the WHIZARD team and contributors are (special topics):
Timothy L. Barklow (SLAC) : Beam spectrum interface, photon physics,
Mikael Berggren (DESY) : Beam spectra, shower/hadronization interfaces, BSM interfaces,
Simon Brass (DESY) : EW physics, parallelization, NLO, performance,
Pia Bredt (U. Siegen) : NLO QCD, NLO EW, structure functions, validation
Marius Höfer (KIT) : NLO QCD, NLO EW, GoSam interface, NLO SMEFT
Nils Kreher (U. Siegen) : SMEFT, muon colliders,
Krzysztof Mekąła (DESY/U. Warszawa) : UFO models, EPA,photon matching,
Christian Speckner (Würzburg) : Beam polarization, FeynRules interface, 3-site models, NLO and dipoles,
Pascal Stienemeier (DESY) : NLO QCD and LHC physics,,
Tobias Striegl (U. Siegen) : SMEFT, QED radiation, lepton collisions,,
Christian Weiss (DESY) : NLO automation, FKS subtraction, phase space,
A. Filip Żarnecki (U. Warszawa) : Photon matching, UFO interface, top threshold, displaced vertices,

Former members of the WHIZARD team are (special topics):
Bijan Chokoufe Nejad : Multi-jet physics, parallelization, shower/matching, top physics, top threshold
Vincent Rothe : NLO QED+EW, matching and merging,
Sebastian Schmidt : Shower, Matching, PYTHIA interface,
Marco Sekulla : EW physics/resonances, unitarization,
So Young Shim : dim 6-operators,
Florian Staub : SARAH interface, FeynRules interface (partially),

Contact:   mail

Support is provided through our launchpad site (link), where questions and answers are publicly available (link).

The current version is 3.1.5 (Sep 13th 2024)

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.

We gratefully thank the contributions from our former team members: Fabian Bach (DESY), Hans-Werner Boschmann (U. Siegen), Christian Fleper (U. Siegen), Steffen Schwertfeger (U. Siegen), Matthias Trudewind (U. Siegen), Daniel Wiesler (DESY)

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):

The reference for the WHIZARD-FeynRules interface is:

  • N. Christensen, C. Duhr, B. Fuks, J. Reuter, C. Speckner, Eur.Phys.J.C72 (2012) 1990, arXiv: 1010.3251. [hep-ph]

WORKSHOPS and WHIZARD User Forum

  • 2nd International WHIZARD Forum, Würzburg U., March 16 - 18, 2015 (link)

  • 1st International WHIZARD Forum, DESY, Nov. 21 - 23, 2011 (link)

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DEVELOPMENT version (SVN trunk)

  • You can also access our subversion repository at http://whizard.hepforge.org/svn/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.ac by executing the shell script build_master.sh, then 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 .

Standard Reference Results as 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.

LEGACY VERSION

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.

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