VINCIA User Reference

July 2010 © W. T. Giele, D. A. Kosower, P. Z. Skands

The VINCIA code is a plugin to the high-energy physics event generator PYTHIA 8. It is based on the dipole-antenna picture of QCD and focusses on describing quark and gluon radiation with high precision. It incorporates a novel scheme for matching to fixed-order matrix elements and also has extensive possibilities for estimating the remaining uncertainties by systematic variation of shower parameters. When activated, it replaces the internal PYTHIA parton cascades. It is currently implemented for massless QCD final-state showers.

This documentation contains brief descriptions of each of the user-specifiable parameters of the VINCIA code, together with instructions how to install, link, and initialize it. Use the menu to the left to navigate. These files are purely for documentation and should not be modified by the user. Instead, see the section on Initialization for how to set and change parameters.

To ensure accurate reproducibility, when quoting VINCIA results, please state both the exact PYTHIA and VINCIA versions used, along with any relevant non-default settings (for both programs). On plots, please give both PYTHIA and VINCIA versions.

VINCIA is licenced under the GNU GPL version 2. Please respect the MCnet Guidelines for Event Generator Authors and Users. The name VINCIA stands for "Virtual Numerical Collider with Interleaved Antennae".

Conventions

As in PYTHIA 8, there are 4 types of parameters:

Useful References

A log of update notes and installation instructions is kept in the README.TXT accompanying the distribution.

The main VINCIA reference is The main PYTHIA 8 reference is

The interface to MADGRAPH further relies on To learn more about the physics of PYTHIA, see The default antenna functions used by VINCIA are described in detail in The basic use of dipole-antennae as a dual description of QCD in the context of Shower Monte Carlos goes back to the Lund dipole, To learn more about Les Houches color tags, used both by PYTHIA and VINCIA to keep track of color connections, see

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