RapidSim: an application for the fast simulation of heavy-quark hadron decays

• Published in: arXiv.org
• Main Authors: Cowan, G A, Craik, D C, Needham, M D
• Format: Paper Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 27.02.2017
• Subjects: Charm (particle physics); Decay rate; Hadrons; Particle decay; Particle physics; Physics - High Energy Physics - Experiment; Quarks; Shape recognition
• ISSN: 2331-8422
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1612.07489

RapidSim is a lightweight application for the fast simulation of phase space decays of beauty and charm quark hadrons, allowing for quick studies of the properties of signal and background decays in particle physics analyses. Based upon the TGenPhaseSpace class from the ROOT application it uses externally provided fixed-order next-to-leading-logarithm calculations to boost the initial beauty and charm hadrons to the appropriate energy for the production environment of interest. User-defined momentum resolution functions can be used to mimic the effect of imperfect track reconstruction. User-defined efficiency shapes can be applied during generation to reproduce the effects of geometric and kinematic requirements on final state particles as well as the dynamics of the decay. The effect of mis-identification of the final state particles is simple to configure via configuration files, while the framework can easily be extended to include additional particle types. This paper describes the RapidSim framework, features and some example use cases.