FLUKA: 18.15.1} High energy model improvements
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18.15.1} High energy model improvements
In all the developments described in this paragraph and also of some in
other paragraphs, J. Ranft always acted as the main mentor and source
of theoretical and often practical support. Even when he did not
contributed to the code directly, his ideas, help and suggestions were
essential part of its development.
The two models developed by the Leipzig group were initially improved
by removing a number of known bugs and approximations (mainly, but not
only, in the kinematics). In the years 1990-1991 all hyperons and
anti-hyperons were added as possible projectiles, and most important,
nuclear effects, previously restricted to Fermi momentum, were
expanded and treated more accurately, with an explicit treatment
of the nuclear well potential, the inclusion of detailed tables
of nuclear masses to account for nuclear binding energy, a consistent exact
determination of nuclear excitation energy and an overall "exact"
conservation of energy and momentum on an event-by-event basis. These
changes were the minimal modifications required for introducing a sensible
evaporation module and related low energy particle production: they made
up the first stage of upgrade of the intermediate and high energy event
generator and were performed by Ferrari and Sala.
In the following years, negative Binomial multiplicity distribution,
correlations between primary interactions and cascade particles and
better energy-angle distributions were implemented.
Sea quark distributions were updated, new distributions
were used for the number of primary collisions using an improved Glauber
cascade approach, and Reggeon mediated interactions (single chains) were
introduced at the lower energy end of the application range of the Dual
Parton Model. An initial improvement of the diffraction treatment as well
of the hadronisation algorithm were performed. These developments ended
up in the 1993 version, which represented the second stage of the high energy
generator development (and which was made available to GEANT3 users, see
later).
Several major changes were performed on both the intermediate and high
energy hadron generator in the years 1994-1996 by Ferrari and Sala.
The latter was extensively improved, bringing its results into much better
agreement with available experimental data from as low as 4 GeV up to
several hundreds of GeV. A fully new treatment of transverse momentum
and of all DPM in general was developed, including a substantially
improved version of the hadronisation code and a new driver
model for managing two-chain events. The existing treatment of
high-energy photonuclear reactions, previously already based on the
VMD model [Bau78] but in an approximate way, was improved by implementing the
contribution of all different vector mesons, as well as the quasielastic
contribution. The simulation of diffractive events was completely reworked
distinguishing between resonant, single-chain and two-chain events, and
a smeared mass distributions for resonance was introduced.
This version of the model was completed in 1996 and performed very well
together with the new "sophisticated" PEANUT when applied to a variety
of problems, ranging from radiation protection, to cosmic ray showers
in the atmosphere and to the test beam of the ATLAS calorimeters.
The latest round of improvements originated by the new interest of
Ferrari and Sala for neutrino physics, triggered by
their participation in the ICARUS experiment and resulted in several
improvements in the high-energy interaction model.
In 1998, a new chain fragmentation/hadronisation scheme was
put to use, and a new diffraction model was worked out once
more according to rigorous scaling, including low mass diffraction
and antibaryon diffraction. In 1999, charm production was set up by
Ranft and Ferrari (reasonable at least for integrated rates),
and charmed particle transport and decay were introduced.
The chain building algorithm was thoroughly revised to ensure a
continuous transition to low energies, and a significant reworking was
done on the chain hadronisation process, providing a smooth and physically
sound passage to chains made up by only two particles, resulting in an
overall better description of particles emitted in the fragmentation
region. This model was thoroughly benchmarked against data taken at WANF
by NOMAD and the particle production data measured by SPY. It constituted
the basis for all calculations performed for CNGS, both in the early
physics design stage and later in the optimisation and engineering studies.
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