Thermal-FIST (or simply The FIST) is a C++ package designed for a convenient general-purpose analysis within the family of the hadron resonance gas (HRG) models. This mainly includes the statistical analysis of particle production in heavy-ion collisions and the phenomenology of the hadronic equation of state.
Particular emphasis is put on fluctuations and correlations of conserved charges, effects of probabilistic decays, chemical non-equilibrium, and inclusion of hadronic interactions.
Calculations are possible within the grand canonical ensemble, the canonical ensemble, as well as in mixed-canonical ensembles combining canonical treatment of strangeness/charm with the grand-canonical treatment of other conserved numbers.
For the grand canonical formulation it possible to include the effects of multi-component repulsive (excluded volumes) and/or attractive (mean-field) interactions between hadrons in the framework of the quantum van der Waals model.
The package contains a fast thermal event generator, with Blast Wave model based momentum distributions, and possibility of simultaneous inclusion of effects of exact charge conservation and hadronic interactions.
The package also includes QtThermalFIST -- a Qt-based graphical user interface frontend designed for a fast and convenient general-purpose thermal model analysis. Typical tasks, such as calculating the equation of state properties or performing the thermal fits, can be done in GUI. Using the GUI can therefore be a good starting point. Please see the Quick Start Guide to get started.
For running Thermal-FIST in the cloud, you may use GitHub Codespaces. It may even possible to run the GUI from a browser, see https://github.com/devcontainers/features/tree/main/src/desktop-lite
For more details please see the Thermal-FIST documentation
It is recommended to use the latest version of the package. See the CHANGELOG
Undocumented new features and bugfixes often first appear in the devel branch
Calculations may break down for excessive/overstressed parameters. This should be carefully monitored, and the accuracy of the output assessed. If in doubt, contact the program author(s).
- Eigen C++ template library for linear algebra (MPL2)
- MINUIT2 function minimization package from CERN-ROOT toolkit (LGPL2.1)
- Mersenne Twister random number generator by M. Matsutomo and T. Nishimura (implementation by R. J. Wagner)
- Qt5 framework for the GUI frontend (LGPL3)
- QCustomPlot Qt C++ widget for plotting and data visualization by Emanuel Eichhammer (GPL)
Please cite the following paper when using this code:
- V. Vovchenko, H. Stoecker, Thermal-FIST: A package for heavy-ion collisions and hadronic equation of state, Comput. Phys. Commun. 244, 295 (2019), arXiv:1901.05249 [nucl-th]
It is expected that changes to the code are documented.
Copyright (C) 2018-2023 Volodymyr Vovchenko