VNI 3.1 MC-simulation program to study high-energy particle collisions in QCD by space-time evolution of parton-cascades and parton-hadron conversion Original Research Article

VNI is a general-purpose Monte Carlo event generator, which includes the simulation of lepton-lepton, lepton-hadron, lepton-nucleus, hadron-hadron, hadron-nucleus, and nucleus-nucleus collisions. On the basis of renormalization-group improved parton description and quantum-kinetic theory, it uses the real-time evolution of parton cascades in conjunction with a self-consistent hadronization scheme that is governed by the dynamics itself. The causal evolution from a specific initial state (determined by the colliding beam particles) is followed by the time development of the phase-space densities of partons, pre-hadronic parton clusters, and final-state hadrons, in position space, momentum space and color space. The parton evolution is described in terms of a space-time generalization of the familiar momentum-space description of multiple (semi) hard interactions in QCD, involving 2 → 2 parton collisions, 2 → 1 parton fusion processes, and 1 → 2 radiation processes. The formation of color-singlet pre-hadronic clusters and their decays into hadrons, on the other hand, is treated by using a spatial criterion motivated by confinement and a non-perturbative model for hadronization. This article gives a brief review of the physics underlying VNI, which is followed by a detailed description of the program itself. The latter program description emphasizes easy-to-use pragmatism and explains how to use the program (including a simple example), annotates input and control parameters, and discusses output data provided by it.