The 20th MCnet Summer School will take place at the Galileo Galilei Institute in Florence, Italy, marking a special milestone: two decades of bringing together the next generation of researchers and the developers of Monte Carlo event generators.
The school provides a five-day course of training in the physics and techniques used in modern Monte Carlo event generators through a combination of lectures, hands-on tutorials, and discussions with event-generator authors. It is aimed at advanced doctoral students and early-career postdoctoral researchers. Please note that the school will take place in person only, with no remote participation option.
The core programme will feature introductory lectures on the physics underlying event generators, more specialised lectures covering a broad range of related topics, and hands-on tutorials with the MCnet event generators used in LHC physics. As in previous years, the programme will also include a poster session and informal evening discussions with Monte Carlo authors, providing plenty of opportunities for interaction between participants and experts in the field.
To celebrate our 20th anniversary, this year’s school will take a look back at two decades of scientific and computational advances that have shaped modern Monte Carlo event generators, and the role of the MCnet community in driving these developments. Looking ahead, we will explore what the next two decades might bring, from increasing demands for precision and computational efficiency to new theoretical approaches, emerging technologies, and the evolving needs of future collider experiments. Through a combination of retrospective and forward-looking lectures and discussions, we hope to celebrate the achievements of the past while inspiring the next generation of Monte Carlo developers and users.
The full list of lectures is:
- Introduction to Event Generators - TBC
- Parton Showers - Melissa van Beekveld (Nikhef)
- Matching and Merging - Christian Preuß (RWTH Aachen)
- Aspects of the EW Standard Model -TBC
- Model-Independent Measurements - TBC
- Event Generators for Heavy Ion Collisions - TBC
- Software Sustainability in HEP - Caterina Doglioni (Manchester)
- Modern Computing Paradigms - TBC
- Machine Learning and Event Generators - TBC
- Industry lecture - TBC
- 20 Years of MCnet: How We Got Here - Mike Seymour (Manchester)
- The Next 20 Years: Where Do We Go From Here? - Fabio Maltoni (Bologna)
Tutorials:
- Computing on GPUs -TBC
- Herwig - TBC
- Pythia - TBC
- Sherpa - TBC
- Write your own Parton Shower -TBC
- MadGraph+Rivet+Contur - TBC
Registration procedure:
Registration will open in early 2027.
Organised by:
Sponsors:
This year's school has received funds by the Galileo Galilei Institute for Theoretical Physics (GGI).