mjsteil / thermal-fist

A package for hadron resonance gas model applications (current version: 1.3)

Thermal-FIST

Thermal-FIST (or simply The FIST) is a C++ package designed for a convenient general-purpose analysis within the family of the hadron resonance gas (HRG) models. This mainly includes the statistical analysis of particle production in heavy-ion collisions and the phenomenology of the hadronic equation of state.

Particular emphasis is put on fluctuations and correlations of conserved charges, effects of probabilistic decays, chemical non-equilibrium, and inclusion of hadronic interactions.

Calculations are possible within the grand canonical ensemble, the canonical ensemble, as well as in mixed-canonical ensembles combining canonical treatment of strangeness/charm with the grand-canonical treatment of other conserved numbers.

For the grand canonical formulation it possible to include the effects of multi-component repulsive (excluded volumes) and/or attractive (mean-field) interactions between hadrons in the framework of the quantum van der Waals model.

The package contains a fast thermal event generator, with Blast Wave model based momentum distributions, and possibility of simultaneous inclusion of effects of exact charge conservation and hadronic interactions.

The package also includes QtThermalFIST -- a Qt-based graphical user interface frontend designed for a fast and convenient general-purpose thermal model analysis. Typical tasks, such as calculating the equation of state properties or performing the thermal fits, can be done in GUI. Using the GUI can therefore be a good starting point. Please see the Quick Start Guide to get started.

For more details please see the Thermal-FIST documentation

Notes

Calculations may break down for excessive/overstressed parameters. This should be carefully monitored, and the accuracy of the output assessed. If in doubt, contact the program author(s).

Third-party code used

• Eigen C++ template library for linear algebra (MPL2)
• MINUIT2 function minimization package from CERN-ROOT toolkit (LGPL2.1)
• Mersenne Twister random number generator by M. Matsutomo and T. Nishimura (implementation by R. J. Wagner)
• Qt5 framework for the GUI frontend (LGPL3)
• QCustomPlot Qt C++ widget for plotting and data visualization by Emanuel Eichhammer (GPL)

Attribution

Please cite the following paper when using this code:

• V. Vovchenko, H. Stoecker, Thermal-FIST: A package for heavy-ion collisions and hadronic equation of state, Comput. Phys. Commun. 244, 295 (2019), arXiv:1901.05249 [nucl-th]

It is expected that changes to the code are documented.

Copyright (C) 2018-2019 Volodymyr Vovchenko