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Update status values for particles with pre-defined decays in simulation

Update the setting of status values for particles with pre-defined decays which interact during simulation.

When quasi-stable particle simulation is activated (MC20 -> MC23) all particles produced by the generator with status 1 (stable) are passed to the simulation (as with all previous campaigns), particles with status 2 (unstable) are also passed to the simulation if part of their trajectory exits the beam-pipe.

This allows particles considered unstable by the generator to potentially deposit energy in sensitive detector regions, improving data MC agreement.

Particles with pre-defined decays may also interact during simulation, if this happens then in the barcode-based EDM used currently. The barcode of the particle after the interaction is set to the highest unused barcode value below HepMC::SIM_BARCODE_OFFSET. In contrast, if a particle without a pre-defined decay (status=1) survives an interaction during the simulation then the barcode of the particle after the interaction is set to parentBarcode+HepMC::SIM_REGENERATION_INCREMENT.

In the new barcode-less EDM (used, but not persistified, in MC23 Sim/Digi/Reco) the status values of all particle which survive an interaction in the simulation is set to parentBarcode+HepMC::SIM_STATUS_INCREMENT.

This has the side-effect of meaning that particles with pre-defined decays which survive interactions in the simulation are classified differently by the BarcodeBased and StatusBased versions of the is_simulation_particle function, which could potentially affect the behaviour of downstream code once the xAOD::TruthParticle EDM is migrated to be barcode-less (!76135).

For consistency with the barcode-based EDM, this MR removes the HepMC::SIM_STATUS_INCREMENT from the status values of particles with pre-defined decays and survive an iteration.

In the future we may want to revert this and instead revise the definition of HepMC::StatusBased::is_simulation_particle.

As the persistent EDM is still barcode-based, this change should have no effect on the CI output.

Edited by John Derek Chapman

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