Therminator: Thermal heavy-Ion generator

Abstract

THERMINATOR is a Monte Carlo event generator designed for studying of particle production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions performed at such experimental facilities as the SPS, RHIC, or LHC. The program implements thermal models of particle production with single freeze-out. It performs the following tasks: 1) generation of stable particles and unstable resonances at the chosen freeze-out hypersurface with the local phase-space density of particles given by the statistical distribution factors, 2) subsequent space-time evolution and decays of hadronic resonances in cascades, 3) calculation of the transverse-momentum spectra and numerous other observables related to the space-time evolution. The geometry of the freeze-out hypersurface and the collective velocity of expansion may be chosen from two successful models, the Cracow single-freeze-out model and the Blast-Wave model. All particles from the Particle Data Tables are used. Experimental cuts may be introduced in a very straightforward manner. The code is written in the object-oriented c++ language and complies to the standards of the ROOT environment.