Study of Monte Carlo event generators for proton-proton collisions at LHC energies in the forward region

Abstract

In this paper we present a comparative study between PYTHIA, EPOS, QGSJET, and SIBYLL generators. The global event observables considered are the charged energy flow, charged-particle distributions, charged-hadron production ratios and $V^0$ ratios. The study is performed in the LHCb and TOTEM fiducial phase-spaces on minimum bias simulated data samples for \emph{pp} collisions at $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV using reference measurements from the aforementioned experiments. In the majority of cases, the measurements are within a band defined by the most extreme predictions. The observed differences between the predictions and the measurements seem to be, in most part, caused by extrapolation from the central pseudorapidity region ($|\eta |\le$ 2.5), in which the generators were mainly tuned.