Eur. Phys. J. C (2017) 77: 784
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-017-5321-8

Special Article - Tools for Experiment and Theory

GAMBIT: the global and modular beyond-the-standard-model inference tool

¹ School of Physics and Astronomy, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, 3800, Australia
² Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Tera-scale, Australia, http://www.coepp.org.au/
³ Department of Physics, University of Oslo, 0316, Oslo, Norway
⁴ SUPA, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK
⁵ Physik-Institut, Universität Zürich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057, Zurich, Switzerland
⁶ H. Niewodniczański Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, 31-342, Kraków, Poland
⁷ Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmoparticle Physics, AlbaNova University Centre, 10691, Stockholm, Sweden
⁸ Department of Physics, Stockholm University, 10691, Stockholm, Sweden
⁹ Department of Physics, McGill University, 3600 rue University, Montreal, QC, H3A 2T8, Canada
¹⁰ Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA
¹¹ Department of Physics, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, 5005, Australia
¹² NORDITA, Roslagstullsbacken 23, 10691, Stockholm, Sweden
¹³ Department of Physics, Imperial College London, Blackett Laboratory, Prince Consort Road, London, SW7 2AZ, UK
¹⁴ Univ Lyon, Univ Lyon 1, ENS de Lyon, CNRS, Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon UMR5574, 69230, Saint-Genis-Laval, France
¹⁵ Theoretical Physics Department, CERN, 1211, Geneva 23, Switzerland
¹⁶ Physics and Astronomy Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA
¹⁷ LAPTh, Université de Savoie, CNRS, 9 chemin de Bellevue, B.P.110, 74941, Annecy-le-Vieux, France
¹⁸ Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Justus-von-Liebig-Weg 3, 37077, Göttingen, Germany
¹⁹ Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA
²⁰ Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies, Centre for Translational Data Science, School of Physics, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia
²¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Seoul National University, 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul, 08826, Korea
²² GRAPPA, Institute of Physics, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1098 XH, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
²³ DESY, Notkestraße 85, 22607, Hamburg, Germany

^* e-mail: p.scott@imperial.ac.uk

Received: 14 March 2017
Accepted: 19 October 2017
Published online: 21 November 2017

Abstract

We describe the open-source global fitting package GAMBIT: the Global And Modular Beyond-the-Standard-Model Inference Tool. GAMBIT combines extensive calculations of observables and likelihoods in particle and astroparticle physics with a hierarchical model database, advanced tools for automatically building analyses of essentially any model, a flexible and powerful system for interfacing to external codes, a suite of different statistical methods and parameter scanning algorithms, and a host of other utilities designed to make scans faster, safer and more easily-extendible than in the past. Here we give a detailed description of the framework, its design and motivation, and the current models and other specific components presently implemented in GAMBIT. Accompanying papers deal with individual modules and present first GAMBIT results. GAMBIT can be downloaded from gambit.hepforge.org.