Status of the PYTHIA7 project

Introduction PYTHIA7 [1] is a new event generator well suited to meet the needs of future high-energy physics projects, for phenomenological and experimental studies. The main target is the LHC community, but it will work equally well for linear e + e colliders, muon colliders, the upgraded Tevatron, as well as for existing and past experiments. The framework is based on the existing Lund program family, but rewritten from scratch in a modern, object-oriented style, using C++. The greatly enhanced structure will make for improved ease of use, extendibility to new physics aspects, and compatibility with other software likely to be used in the future. Furthermore, the PYTHIA7 framework encapsulates the structure of the event generation process in such a way that any model (either for the whole generation process or a small part of it) can be introduced without changing the interface to the user. The hope is that this framework will become a standard for event generation giving man