Geant4 User Workshop and Tutorials

Salamanca, 15-19 July 2002

Programme

Monday

Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
10 Welcome BQ 10 Physics and processes: overview MG 10 Primary generator PA 10 Hadronic physics 2
Radioactive Decay
VL 10 Overview of Geant4 results and medical applications MG
10.10 Overview of Geant4 MG 10.30 EM physics 1 VI 10.20 Magnetic field &
Tracking
PA 10.45 User presentations  
10.30 Geant4 installation GC 10.50 Analysis Tools MG 11    
11.10 Basic user application VL

11.30

Coffee/Tea break

12 Basic geometry GC 12 EM physics 2 VI 12 Visualisation VL 12 Advanced geometry GC 12 User presentations  
12.20 UI VL
VI
12.30 Hadronic physics 1
12.40 Detector response
PA?

13

Contingency

Contingency

13.30

Lunch break

16.30 Exercise 1
Geant4 installation
Run Novice Example
GC
VL

VI

SG

16.30 Brachytherapy exercise, part 1 GC
MG
SG
16.30 Brachytherapy exercise, part 2 GC
MG
SG
16.30 Human eye phantom exercise VL
SG
16.30 Brachytherapy exercise, part 3 MG
SG

Draft lectures

General features

Introduction to Geant4
What is Geant4
Software engineering in Geant4
Geant4 architecture
Overview of functionalities
Execution flow
Transparencies
Installation of Geant4
Supported platforms
Installation
Environment variables, make files
Making an executable
Transparencies
Building a Geant4 application
Architecture of a basic user application
User initialisation classes
User action classes
Transparencies

Detector description

Basic geometry and materials
Units and Materials
Concepts of G4LogicalVolume, G4VPhysicalVolume : Placements, parameterised volumes, replicas
Concept of G4VSolid : CSG, BREP, Boolean solids
Concept of G4VTouchable
Transparencies
Advanced geometry
Optimization of geometry : Voxelization and "smartlessness"
Grouping volumes
Reflection of solids and hierarchies
User-defined solid
Interface to CAD systems
Debugging tools
Transparencies
Detector response
Sensitive detector
Readout geometry
Hits
Digitisation
Transparencies
Magnetic field
How to define magnetic field
Integration of the field
Transportation in magnetic field
Transparencies (introduction)
Transparencies (propagation)

Physics

Introduction to Geant4 physics
Basic principles of Geant4 physics
Architecture
Particles, Processes and Cuts
Transparencies
Electromagnetic physics
Standard processes
Low energy processes
Muon processes
Optical processes
Hadronic Physics
Transparencies
Radioactive decay
Primary event generation
G4VPrimaryGeneratorAction class
G4ParticleGun, G4HEPEvtInterface
General particle source
Transparencies

Interactive facilities

Visualisation
Drivers
Basic functionalities
Transparencies
User Interface
Built-in commands
Macro file
Alias
User-defined commands
Transparencies (UI)
Transparencies (commands)
Analysis Tools
AIDA (Abstract Interfaces for Data Analysis)
Anaphe (Analysis for Physics Experiments)
Analysis in a Geant4 application
Transparencies

An overview of Geant4 applications and results

Applications
LHC experiments
BaBar
HARP
Astrophysics and astroparticle physics
Gravitational waves
Medical physics
Transparencies

Exercise 1

Reference: Geant4 novice examples (geant4/examples/novice/)

Brachytherapy exercise

Reference: Geant4 Brachytherapy advanced example
Part 1 Part 2
Use case: model a brachytherapy seed and a phantom
  1. Use case: model a 192Ir brachytherapy seed
  2. Use case: model a water phantom
  3. Use case: visualise the geometry
  4. Exercise: model a soft tissue phantom
  5. Exercise: select phantom material from the UI
  6. Exercise: model a 125I brachytherapy seed
  7. Use case: model the radioactive source as a primary generator of monocromatic photons
  8. Exercise: model the spectrum of a 125I source

Basics of a user application

Brachytherapy exercise

Use case: calculate the energy deposit in a phantom from a brachytherapy seed
  1. Use case: generate physics interactions in the phantom
  2. Exercise: select alternative physics processes
  3. Exercise: modify the production thresholds
  4. Use case: collect the energy deposit in the phantom
  5. Exercise: model the hits as consisting of the energy deposited in each voxel and the coordinates of the voxel centre
  6. Use case: produce a 1-D histogram with the energy deposited in the phantom
  7. Exercise: produce a 2-D histogram with the dose distribution in the phantom
 

Exercise 2

Reference: Human eye phantom.  

Exercises source code

source code archive (to uncompress do: gunzip salex.tar.gz; tar xvf salex.tar)

User presentations

Penelope: overview and benchmark simulations (J.M. Fernandez Varea)
Efficiency calibration of a Germanium gamma-ray detector using Geant4 (S. Hurtado)
Geant4 simulation of the energy loss of slow negatively charged hadrons (J.M. Fernandez Varea)

Last modified 18 May 2003 - Maria Grazia Pia, Gabriele Cosmo