Status of Monte-Carlo Event Generators

Recent progress on general-purpose Monte-Carlo event generators is reviewed with emphasis on the simulation of hard QCD processes and subsequent parton cascades. Describing full final states of high-energy particle collisions in contemporary experiments is an intricate task. Hundreds of particles are typically produced, and the reactions involve both large and small momentum transfer. The high-dimensional phase space makes an exact solution of the problem impossible. Instead, one typically resorts to regarding events as factorized into different steps, ordered descending in the mass scales or invariant momentum transfers which are involved. In this picture, a hard interaction, described through fixed-order perturbation theory, is followed by multiple Bremsstrahlung emissions off initial- and final-state and, finally, by the hadronization process, which binds QCD partons into color-neutral hadrons. Each of these steps can be treated independently, which is the basic concept inherent to general-purpose event generators. Their development is nowadays often focused on an improved description of radiative corrections to hard processes through perturbative QCD. In this context, the concept of jets is introduced, which allows to relate sprays of hadronic particles in detectors to the partons in perturbation theory. In this talk, we briefly review recent progress on perturbative QCD in event generation. The main focus lies on the general-purpose Monte-Carlo programs HERWIG, PYTHIA and SHERPA, which will be the workhorses for LHC phenomenology. A detailed description of the physics models included in these generators can be found in (8). We also discuss matrix-element generators, which provide the parton-level input for general-purpose Monte Carlo.