Pythia 8 underlying event tune for RHIC energies

Manny Rosales Aguilar, Zilong Chang, Raghav Kunnawalkam Elayavalli, Renee Fatemi, Yang He, Yuanjing Ji, Dmitry Kalinkin, Matthew Kelsey, Isaac Mooney, Veronica Verkest

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

We report an underlying event tune for the pythia8 Monte Carlo event generator that is applicable for hadron collisions primarily at s ranges available at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC). We compare our new pythia8 tuned predictions to midrapidity inclusive π± spectra, jet substructure, Drell-Yan production, and underlying event measurements from RHIC and the Tevatron, as well as underlying event data from the Large Hadron Collider. With respect to the default pythia8 Monash Tune, the new "Detroit"tune shows significant improvements in the description of the experimental data. Additionally, we explore the validity of pythia8 predictions for forward rapidity π in s=200 GeV collisions, where neither tune is able to sufficiently describe the data. We advocate for the new tune to be used for pythia8 studies at current and future RHIC experiments, and discuss future tuning exercises at lower center-of-mass energies, where forward/backward kinematics are essential at the upcoming Electron-Ion Collider.

Original languageEnglish
Article number016011
JournalPhysical Review D
Volume105
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 1 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We would like to thank the STAR collaboration and its management for initiating such a tuning exercise and their support and comments during the tuning process has indelibly contributed to its successful completion. We also like to thank Elke-Caroline Aschenauer and Carl Gagliardi in particular for input during the tuning. Special thanks to Flemming Videbaek for access to BRAHMS data. We express our gratitude to Christian Bierlich for useful discussions throughout this work. We thank the RCF facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Wayne State University high performance computing center for the computational resources used for this work. This work was supported in part by the Office of Nuclear Physics within the U.S. DOE Office of Science, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)

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