Rivet — the particle-physics MC analysis toolkit

[//]: # WANTED: experiment analysis routines! [//]: # We need your analyses! Preserving analysis logic in a re-runnable, re-interpretable form is a key part of scientific reproducibility and impact at the LHC and other HEP experiments. Over 2000 analyses have been preserved so far — join the club! If you are member of an experimental collaboration, please have a look at the analysis wishlist and help us by providing us with Rivet analyses for your publications. This is also key to ensuring that your measurement and search analyses get used (and cited)! [//]: # Number of Rivet analyses vs time

[//]: # Docker containers for Rivet [//]: # Fully working and relatively lightweight Rivet containers are available with all dependencies necessary for running generators and Rivet, building plugins, and plotting. We suggest this to be used in tutorials and for people eager to try out Rivet. [//]: # A short documentation showing how to use Rivet in three simple steps is given at our Docker instructions [//]: # docker pull hepstore/rivet [//]: # or rivet-pythia or rivet-herwig, rivet-mg5amcnlo, etc. You can find a full list of available images at DockerHub hepstore.

[//]: # Doxygen [//]: # All classes and functions are documented via doxygen. We suggest to consult this page when writing new analyses. Doxygen code documentation

The Rivet toolkit (Robust Independent Validation of Experiment and Theory) is a system for validation of Monte Carlo event generators. It provides a large (and ever growing) set of experimental analyses useful for MC generator development, validation, and tuning, as well as a convenient infrastructure for adding your own analyses.

Rivet is the most widespread way by which analysis code from the LHC and other high-energy collider experiments is preserved for comparison to and development of future theory models. It is used by phenomenologists, MC generator developers, and experimentalists on the LHC and other facilities.

The MC generators Pythia 8, Herwig and Sherpa have convenient user interfaces for producing input events for Rivet analysis, as well as built-in Rivet support.

• Object-oriented C++ framework for analysis algorithms
• Ever-increasing collection of analyses: more than 2000 so far!
• Python interface and suite of user-friendly data handling scripts
• Large collection of generator-independent event analysis tools
• Automatic caching of expensive calculations, for efficiently running many analyses on each event
• Flexible system for fast detector effect simulation in BSM analyses
• Close matching of standard observables to experimental analysis definitions
• Reference data connection to HepData, avoid hard-coding

Up-to-date documentation and tutorials can be found on our Gitlab pages.

The Rivet 4 release note is available on the arXiv and is published in SciPost Physics Codebases 36 (2024) 1.

The Rivet 3 paper, including a short user guide, is available at this arXiv link and published in SciPost Phys. 8 (2020) 026.

The old Rivet 1 user manual is also available on the arXiv and is published in Comput.Phys.Commun. 184 (2013) 2803-2819.