English

An Iterative Rejection Sampling Method

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2008-07-18 v1

Abstract

In the note we consider an iterative generalisation of the rejection sampling method. In high energy physics, this sampling is frequently used for event generation, i.e. preparation of phase space points distributed according to a matrix element squared M2|M|^2 for a scattering process. In many realistic cases M2|M|^2 is a complicated multi-dimensional function, so, the standard von Neumann procedure has quite low efficiency, even if an error reducing technique, like VEGAS, is applied. As a result of that, many of the M2|M|^2 calculations go to ``waste''. The considered iterative modification of the procedure can extract more ``unweighted'' events, i.e. distributed according to M2|M|^2. In several simple examples we show practical benefits of the technique and obtain more events than the standard von Neumann method, without any extra calculations of M2|M|^2.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0807.2823,
  title  = {An Iterative Rejection Sampling Method},
  author = {A. Sherstnev},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0807.2823},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

16 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:01:50.310Z