[LHAPDF-announce] LHAPDF 6.1.0 released!

[Andy Buckley]

Dear LHAPDF users,

They say not to release software on a Friday, but after long development
we today finished development and testing of of LHAPDF 6.1.0, and are
very happy to announce the release!

The LHAPDF 6.1.0 source tarball can be downloaded now from the Web site
at http://lhapdf.hepforge.org/


NEW FEATURES

This is the first major version update since the first stable release of
LHAPDF6, and includes *many* developments. In particular we highlight
the following:

* A _complete_ collection of compatibility functions with LHAPDF5,
including some "minor" ones which were needed to run POWHEG and
MadGraph5_aMC at NLO. The libLHAPDF.a static library now works correctly as
well.

* We've introduced a "Pythia6 compatibility mode", to reproduce the old
(wrong!) behaviour where LambdaQCD values were wrongly reported to
Pythia6. This ensures that Pythia6 MC tunes will behave exactly the same
with LHAPDF6 as with LHAPDF5, making migration much easier, unless the
compatibility mode is turned off.

* A set of functions have been added to PDFSet (and the legacy Fortran
interface) for automatic calculation of appropriate PDF uncertainty
bands, correlations, and random samplings from Hessian sets.

* The build system has been improved a bit further and CMake is no
longer required to build LHAPDF6: for most users on modern systems a
simple ".configure --prefix=... && make && make install" should be
enough!. Some detailed instructions for working around the sorts of
problems that can occur on Mac systems will appear on the LHAPDF web
page soon.


MORE PDF SET APPROVALS

At the same time we are very pleased to announce the approval of the
HERAPDF 1.5 and ATLAS-epWZ12 PDF sets for LHAPDF6. There are now 250 PDF
sets available for LHAPDF6 (from the CTEQ, NNPDF, MSTW, HERA, ATLAS
groups), of which 235 are officially validated by the set authors: see
http://lhapdf.hepforge.org/pdfsets.html for the full list. LHAPDF6 now
has officially approved versions of all PDF sets required for the
PDF4LHC uncertainty procedure.

Please note that at the request of the authors, some of the "minor" MSTW
sets have been given slightly different ID numbers to avoid overlaps
between their members: typically MSTW sets with ID numbers ending in 41
now end with 50.

The PDF sets may be used with all released versions of LHAPDF6, but will
work best with 6.1.0. They can all be downloaded from
https://www.hepforge.org/archive/lhapdf/pdfsets/6.1/
or by using the "lhapdf" script to make automatic updates and downloads
of data files.


Have fun using LHAPDF 6.1.0 and the newly approved PDF sets!

Best wishes,
Andy & the LHAPDF6 team

-- 
Dr Andy Buckley, Royal Society University Research Fellow
Particle Physics Expt Group, University of Glasgow / PH Dept, CERN