Pluto: A Monte Carlo Simulation Tool for Hadronic Physics

Pluto is a Monte-Carlo event generator designed for hadronic interactions from Pion production threshold to intermediate energies of a few GeV per nucleon, as well as for studies of heavy ion reactions. The package is entirely based on ROOT, without the need of additional packages, and uses the embedded C++ interpreter of ROOT to control the event production. The generation of events based on a single reaction chain and the storage of the resulting particle objects can be done with a few lines of a ROOT-macro. However, the complete control of the package can be taken over by the steering macro and user-defined models may be added without a recompilation of the framework. Multi-reaction cocktails can be facilitated as well using either mass-dependent or user-defined static branching ratios. The included physics uses resonance production with mass-dependent Breit-Wigner sampling. The calculation of partial and total widths for resonances producing unstable Presentation given at the XI International Workshop on Advanced Computing and Analysis Techniques in Physics Research, April 23-27 2007, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Participant in the GSI International Summer Student Program. now at: Ventana Systems, Inc., Harvard. now at: Kernfysisch Versneller Instituut, Groningen now at: Physikalisches Institut, Universitat Bonn. now at: Institut fur Kernphysik.