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Global tuning of hadronic interaction models with accelerator-based and astroparticle data

Nature Reviews Physics volume 8, pages 98–114 (2026)Cite this article

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Abstract

In high-energy and astroparticle physics, event generators have an essential role, even in the simplest data analyses. Physical processes occurring in hadronic collisions are simulated within a Monte Carlo framework but a major challenge remains modelling of hadron dynamics at low momentum transfer, which includes the initial and final phases of every hadronic collision. Phenomenological models inspired by quantum chromodynamics used for these phases cannot guarantee completeness or correctness over the full phase space. These models usually include parameters which must be tuned to suitable experimental data. Until now, event generators have primarily been developed and tuned based on data from high-energy physics experiments at accelerators. However, in many cases, they have been found to not satisfactorily describe data from astroparticle experiments, which provide sensitivity especially to hadrons produced nearly parallel to the collision axis and cover centre-of-mass energies up to several hundred tera-electronvolts, well beyond those reached at colliders so far. Here, we address the complementarity of these two sets of data and present a roadmap for a unified tuning of event generators with accelerator-based and astroparticle data.

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Fig. 1: Predictions from hadronic interaction models for different interaction scenarios in comparison with data.
Fig. 2: Effects of changing basic observables of hadronic interactions to different extensive air shower observables for 1019.5 eV proton showers simulated with CONEX using SIBYLL 2.1 as the baseline model.
Fig. 3: Muon content of extensive air showers as a function of the shower energy E from different experiments.
Fig. 4: Schematic overview of tuning of event generators in high-energy physics and the extension to include data from astroparticle physics.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is a comprehensive overview of work that has been advanced with a collaboration of experts during the workshop ‘Tuning of hadronic interaction models’ (https://indico.uni-wuppertal.de/event/284/) at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal in January 2024. The international workshop was organized as part of the Collaborative Research Center SFB1491, Cosmic Interacting Matters — From Source to Signal. The authors acknowledge the support of the workshop and the related research by many of the workshop participants and authors of this paper by SFB1491, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under project no. 445052434. J.A. acknowledges additional support from the Heisenberg Programme of DFG (German Research Foundation) under project no. AL 1639/5-1 and from the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF, Federal Ministry of Education and Research) under grant no. 05H21PECL1 within ErUM-FSP T04. H.D. acknowledges funding from the DFG under project no. 449728698. K.-H.K. acknowledges additional support from the BMBF under grant nos. 05A20PX1 and 05A23PX1 and from DFG under project no. 445990517. G.S. acknowledges support from the DFG under Germany’s Excellence Strategy — EXC 2121 Quantum Universe — 390833306 and from the BMBF under grants 05A20GU2 and 05A23GU3. N.K. acknowledges support from the Monash Warwick Alliance as part of the Monash Warwick Alliance in Particle Physics and from the LHC Physics Centre at CERN (LPCC). S.O. acknowledges support from the DFG under project nos. 465275045 and 550225003. F.R. has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 101065027. T.S. has been supported by the Swedish Research Council under contract no. 2016-05996. L.C. thanks Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion/Agencia Estatal de Investigacon (PID2022-140510NB-I00 and RYC2019-027017-I), Xunta de Galicia (CIGUS Network of Research Centers, Consolidation 2021GRCGI-2033, ED431C-2021/22 and ED431F-2022/15) and the European Union (ERDF). J. Blazek, J. Ebr and J.V. have received funding from the following grants: CAS LQ100102401, GACR 21-02226M and MEYS CZ.02.01.01/00/22_008/0004632. P. Paakkinen acknowledges support from the Research Council of Finland (projects 330448 and 331545) and as a part of the Center of Excellence in Quark Matter of the Research Council of Finland (project 364194). R.C. acknowledges support from the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), Portugal, under project https://doi.org/10.54499/2024.06879.CERN. The work of M.V.G. has been supported in part by the DFG through the Research Unit FOR 2926 ‘Next generation pQCD for hadron structure: preparing for the EIC’, project no. 40824754. A.F. and A.P. acknowledge support from Academia Sinica (grant no. AS-GCS-113-M04).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ruhr Astroparticle and Plasma Physics Center (RAPP Center), Bochum, Germany

    J. Albrecht, J. Becker Tjus, H. Dembinski, K.-H. Kampert, K. Kröninger, W. Rhode & F. Riehn

  2. Department of Physics, TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany

    J. Albrecht, N. Behling, J. Boelhauve, H. Dembinski, L. Dietrich, J. Ellbracht, P. Gutjahr, K. Hymon, M. Hünnefeld, L. Kardum, L. Kolk, K. Kröninger, W. Rhode, F. Riehn & M. E. Windau

  3. Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, Dortmund, Germany

    J. Albrecht & W. Rhode

  4. Theoretical Physics IV: Plasma Astroparticle Physics, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    J. Becker Tjus

  5. Department of Space, Earth and Environment, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

    J. Becker Tjus

  6. FZU — Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic

    J. Blazek, J. Ebr & J. Vícha

  7. Institute for Theoretical Physics, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    M. Bleicher

  8. Instituto Galego de Física de Altas Enerxías (IGFAE), Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

    L. Cazon

  9. Physics Department, Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    R. Conceição

  10. Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas (LIP), Lisbon, Portugal

    R. Conceição

  11. Institute for Astroparticle Physics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany

    R. Engel, A. Haungs, T. Huege, T. Pierog, M. Reininghaus, M. Roth & M. Unger

  12. Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

    A. Fedynitch & A. Prosekin

  13. Particle Theory Department, Fermilab, Batavia, IL, USA

    M. Fieg

  14. II Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    M. V. Garzelli, S. Ostapchenko & G. Sigl

  15. Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, University of Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany

    C. Gaudu, K.-H. Kampert, L. Morejon, J. Rautenberg & A. Sandrock

  16. INFN, Sezione di Firenze, Florence, Italy

    G. Graziani

  17. Astrophysical Institute, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

    T. Huege

  18. School of Physics and Astronomy, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia

    N. Korneeva

  19. IPHC — Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien, CNRS-IN2P3/Université de Strasbourg, UMR 7178, Strasbourg, France

    A. Maire

  20. Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research (ISEE), Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan

    H. Menjo

  21. Department of Physics, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    P. Paakkinen & M. Utheim

  22. Helsinki Institute of Physics, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    P. Paakkinen

  23. Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), Zeuthen, Germany

    P. Plotko & L. Pyras

  24. Erlangen Center for Astroparticle Physics (ECAP), Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany

    L. Pyras

  25. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    L. Pyras & D. Soldin

  26. European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva, Switzerland

    T. Pöschl

  27. Department of Physics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    I. Sarcevic

  28. Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, Heidelberg, Germany

    M. Schmelling

  29. Department of Physics, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    T. Sjöstrand

  30. SUBATECH — Laboratory of Subatomic Physics and Associated Technologies, Nantes University, IMT Atlantique, CNRS/IN2P3, Nantes, France

    K. Werner

  31. Institute for Experimental Physics 1b, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    V. Zhukov

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  1. J. Albrecht
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  55. V. Zhukov
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Contributions

All authors have contributed to the scientific content and writing of the manuscript. Coordination during the writing process and revisions was done by J.A., H.D., C.G., K.-H.K. and F.R.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to J. Albrecht, C. Gaudu, K.-H. Kampert or F. Riehn.

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Albrecht, J., Becker Tjus, J., Behling, N. et al. Global tuning of hadronic interaction models with accelerator-based and astroparticle data. Nat Rev Phys 8, 98–114 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-025-00897-3

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