A Short Course on Geant4 Simulation Toolkit

Introduction

http://cern.ch/geant4

The role of simulation

Simulation plays a fundamental role in various domains and phases of Simulation plays a fundamental role in various domains and phases of an experimental physics projectan experimental physics project– design of the experimental set-up

– evaluation and definition of the potential physics output of the project

– evaluation of potential risks to the project

– assessment of the performance of the experiment

– development, test and optimisation of reconstruction and physics analysis software

– contribution to the calculation and validation of physics results

The scope of these lectures (and of Geant4) encompasses the simulation of simulation of

the passage of particles through matterthe passage of particles through matter– there are other kinds of simulation components, such as physics event generators,

electronics response generation, etc.

– often the simulation of a complex experiment consists of several of these components interfaced to one another

Detector Simulation - General General characteristics of a detector simulation system– You specify the geometry of a particle detector

– Then the software system automatically transports the particle you shoot into the detector by simulating the particle interactions in matter based on the Monte Carlo method

The heart of the simulation: the Monte Carlo method– A method to search for solutions to a mathematical problem

using a statistical sampling with random numbers

Basic requirements for a simulation system

Modeling the experimental set-up

Tracking particles through matter

Interaction of particles with matter

Modeling the detector response

Run and event controlAccessory utilities (random number generators, PDG particle information etc.)

Interface to event generators

Visualisation of the set-up, tracks and hits

User interface

Persistency

EGS4, EGS5, EGSnrcGeant3, Geant4 MARSMCNP, MCNPX, A3MCNP, MCNP-DSP, MCNP4BMVP, MVP-BURNPenelopePeregrineTripoli-3, Tripoli-3 A, Tripoli-4

DPMEA-MCFLUKA GEMHERMESLAHETMCBEND MCU MF3DNMTCMONK MORSERTS&T-2000 SCALETRAXVMC++

...and I probably forgot some moreMany codes not publicly distributed

A lot of business around MC

The zoo

Monte Carlo codes presented at the MC200 Conference, Lisbon, October 2000Monte Carlo codes presented at the MC200 Conference, Lisbon, October 2000

What is ?What is ?OO Toolkit for the simulation of OO Toolkit for the simulation of next generation HEP detectorsnext generation HEP detectors

...of the current generation too

...not only of HEP detectors

An experiment of distributed software production distributed software production

and managementand management

An experiment of application of rigorous software engineering methodologiessoftware engineering methodologies

and Object Oriented technology Object Oriented technology to the HEP environment

also…

Born from the requirements of large scale HEP experiments

Geant3

Fortran CERN product

inadequate for LHC experiments

R&D phase: RD44, 1994 - 1998

1st release: December 1998

2 new releases/year since then

ATLAS

LHCb

9 o

rder

s o

f m

agn

itu

de!

HiggsHiggs

all all interactionsinteractions

StorageStorageraw recording rate 0.1–1 GByte/saccumulating at 12-14 PBytes/year

ProcessingProcessing70,000 of today’s fastest PCs(~6 hours’ Intel CPU production today)

1000 person-years1000 person-years“0ffline” software effort per experiment

~5000 physicists~5000 physicistsaround the world, around the clock

20 years software life-span

Born from the requirements of large scale HEP experiments

Geant3

Fortran CERN product

inadequate for LHC experiments

LHC

An example of user application

FAO/IAEA International Conference on Area-Wide Control of Insect PestsArea-Wide Control of Insect Pests:

Integrating the Sterile Insect and Related Nuclear and Other Techniques

Vienna, May 9-13, 2005

K. Manai, K. Farah, A.Trabelsi, F. Gharbi and O. Kadri (Tunisia)

Dose Distribution and Dose Uniformity in Pupae Treated by the Tunisian Gamma Irradiator Using the

GEANT4 Toolkit

Geant4 CollaborationGeant4 Collaboration

CERN, ESA, KEK, SLAC, TRIUMF, TJNL

INFN, IN2P3, PPARCBarcelona Univ., Budker Inst., Frankfurt Univ., Karolinska

Inst., Helsinki Univ., Lebedev Inst., LIP, Northeastern Univ. etc.

MoU basedDistribution, Development and User Support of Geant4

What Can Geant4 Do for You? Transports a particle step-by-step by taking into

account the interactions with materials and external electromagnetic fields until the particle

loses its kinetic energy to zero,disappears by an interaction,comes to the end of the simulation volume

Provides a way for the user to access the transportation process and grab the simulation results

at the beginning and end of transportation,at the end of each stepping in transportation,at the time when the particle is going into the sensitive

volume of the detectoretc.

These are called “User Actions”

What You Have to Do for Geant4? Three essential information you have to provide:

Geometrical information of the detector Choice of physics processes Kinematical information of particles going into the detector

Auxiliary you have to prepare: Magnetic and electric field Actions you want to take when you access the particle

transportation Actions you want to take when a particle goes into a

sensitive volume of the detector etc.

Tools for Input PreparationGeant4 provides standard tools to help you to prepare

input information

Multiple choices to describe the detector geometryCombining basic geometry elements (box, cylinder,

trapezoid, etc)Representation by surface planesRepresentation by boolean operation, etc.

Standard way to define materials in the detectorA large collection of examples to define various materials

A set of wide variety of particlesStandard elementary particles (electron, muon, proton,….)Unstable particles (resonances, quarks, …)IonsExotic particles (geantino, charged geantino)

Choice of Physics Processes Geant4 provides a wide variety of physics models of

particle interactions with matter you can select Category of physics processes

Standard electromagnetic processes

Low energy electromagnetic processes

Hadronic processes

How to use physics processesA rich samples of Physics List provided with example

applications

Recommended Physics List (educated guess) for hadronic

physics

Minimum Software Knowledge to Use Geant4

C++– Geant4 is implemented in C++, therefore a basic knowledge of C++ is

mandatory– C++ is a complex language, but you are not required to be a C++ expert to

use Geant4

Object Oriented Technology– basic concepts– in-depth knowledge needed only for the development of complex

applications

Unix/Linux – Unix/Linux is a standard working environment for Geant4, therefore a

minimum knowledge/experience is required How to use basic Unix command How to compile a C++ code

– Windows You can use Visual C++ Though still you need some knowledge of Unix (cygwin) for installation

Tools to Help Your Simulation

User interface Interactive mode with terminal or GUI

Batch mode

Visualisation Trajectory of a particle and its all secondaries

Detector geometry

Debugging

Controllable verbose outputs from the kernel during

transportation

Errors in the geometry definition, etc.

Data analysis