Gammaray Telescope: an advanced example for the GEANT4 toolkit

F.Longo (Ferrara), R.Giannitrapani (Udine) & G.Santin (Trieste) -- December 2000


Acknowledgments to GEANT4 people, in particular to R.Nartallo, A.Pfeiffer, M.G.Pia and G.Cosmo
GammaRayTel is an example of application of Geant4 in a space envinronment. It simulates a typical telescope for gamma ray analysis; the detector setup is composed by a tracker made with silicon planes, subdivided in ladders and strips, a CsI calorimeter and an anticoincidence system. In this version, only the tracker is made sensitive; the hits on the tracker strips are registered and relevant information (energy deposition, position etc) are dumped to an external ASCII file for subsequent analysis. If Lizard is available on the user platform, than some histograms with relevant hits information are displayed and saved as PostScript files.

The main features of this example are

  1. Macros for the visualization of geometry and tracks with OpenGL, VRML and DAWN drivers
  2. Implementation of messengers to change some parameters of the detector geometry, the particle generator and the analysis manager (if present) runtime
  3. Readout geometry mechanism to describe an high number of subdivisions of the planes of the tracker (strips) without affecting in a relevant way the simulation performances
  4. Histogramming for Linux and Solaris platform via the Lizard system (tested on Linux platform); this is a preliminary feature of GEANT4, so expect some changes and/or improvements in future releases
  5. User interfaces via Xmotif or normal terminal provided

1 Setting up the environment variables