[Herwig-announce] Herwig 7 release announcement

[David Grellscheid]

Dear users of Herwig,

You may just have noticed that we are writing to you as users of Herwig 
instead of Herwig++. And you may have noticed that it is Herwig and not 
HERWIG. All of this is fully intentional, since a major new release of 
the Monte Carlo event generator Herwig++ (version 3.0) is now available. 
This release marks the end of distinguishing Herwig++ and HERWIG 
development and therefore constitutes the first major release of version 
7 of the Herwig event generator family.

The new version features a number of significant improvements to the 
event simulation, including: built-in NLO hard process calculation for 
all Standard Model processes, with matching to both angular ordered and 
dipole shower modules via both subtractive (MC at NLO-type) and 
multiplicative (Powheg-type) algorithms; QED radiation and spin 
correlations in the angular ordered shower; a consistent treatment of 
perturbative uncertainties within the hard process and parton showering, 
as well as a long list of further bug fixes and improvements.

More details on these developments can be found in the accompanying 
release note, arXiv:1512.01178 [hep-ph] as well as in the vastly 
expanded documentation at

​https://herwig.hepforge.org/

where the release tarballs are also avilable. From now on, the 
installation of Herwig 7, ThePEG 2 and all of its dependencies is also 
possible via a convenient bootstrap script which can be found at

​https://herwig.hepforge.org/herwig-bootstrap

A detailed manual covering all technical and physics developments is in 
preparation. When using Herwig 7, please cite the Herwig++ 2 physics and 
manual, arXiv:0803.0883 and the Herwig 7 release note (arXiv:1512.01178) 
as well as the main Herwig 7 manual, once available.

Please direct any issues and questions to

​herwig at projects.hepforge.org

We will quickly respond to your query and open a ticket at

​https://herwig.hepforge.org/trac/

to continue further discussion, if required.

Herwig 7 contains all the features required to simulate Standard Model 
processes at lepton-lepton, lepton-hadron and hadron-hadron colliders at 
NLO+PS accuracy within one program. We are looking forward to any 
feedback from our experimental and theory users.

As with prior versions of Herwig++, Herwig is covered by the GNU General 
Public License (GPL) version 2 and the MCnet guidelines for the 
distribution and usage of event generator software in an academic 
setting, which are distributed together with the source.

With best wishes,

Johannes Bellm, Stefan Gieseke, David Grellscheid, Simon Plätzer, 
Michael Rauch, Christian Reuschle, Peter Richardson, Peter Schichtel, 
Mike Seymour, Andrzej Siódmok, Alix Wilcock, and Nadine Fischer, Graeme 
Nail, Andreas Papaefstathiou, Daniel Rauch.

CERN, Durham, Hamburg, Karlsruhe, Manchester, Monash, Tallahassee, 
December 2015.