MCnetITN3 is an Innovative Training Network dedicated to developing and supporting general-purpose Monte Carlo event generators throughout the LHC era and beyond, training the next generation of event generator developers and providing training of a wide selection of its user base, particularly through funded short-term 'residencies' and Annual Schools.
Monte Carlo event generators are computer programs that simulate the final states of high energy particle collisions, and are central to particle physics. They are used by almost all experimental collaborations to plan their experiments and analyze their data, and by theorists to simulate the complex final states of the fundamental interactions that may signal new physics.
The network consists of the Universities of Manchester, Durham, Glasgow, Göttingen, Louvain and Lund, University College London and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, joined by academic partners CERN, Fermilab, Heidelberg, Monash (Australia) and Vienna and non-academic partners B12, Blue Yonder, d-fine and Ion Beam Applications.
Our training programme was implemented through the recruitment of 11 long-term Early Stage Researchers to complete PhDs in Monte Carlo event generator physics, techniques and related disciplines, and of 144 ESR-months of short-term positions, whereby students registered for a PhD elsewhere could receive complementary training by working in one of our groups for three to six months, and through Annual Schools in Europe both for our own ESRs and for the external community, as well as two schools outside Europe, annual training events for our ESRs and bi-annual network meetings. The long-term ESRs have all been offered non-academic secondments in one of our partners, as well as academic secondments as part of their ongoing research.
Our research programme is divided into six sub-projects, three of which develop fully-fledged general purpose event generators (Pythia, Herwig and Sherpa) capable of simulating all the stages of a high-energy particle collision, two of which develop more specialised simulations of specific event generator steps (Madgraph and Plugin, which includes sub-projects Ariadne/DIPSY and HEJ) and one of which (CEDAR) develops a suite of programs related to the deployment and optimisation of these generators for particle physics experiments and analysis.
