Introduction to parton-shower event generators

Abstract

This lecture discusses the physics implemented by Monte Carlo event generators for hadron colliders. It details the construction of parton showers and the matching of parton showers to fixed-order calculations at higher orders in perturbative QCD. It also discusses approaches to merge calculations for a varying number of jets, the interface to the underlying event and hadronization.

Comments: 40 pages, 12 figures. Lectures presented at TASI 2014