Refresher Course

IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference, Valencia, 26 October 2011

Abstract

This Refresher Course overviews Geant4 main features, with emphasis on Geant4 physics modeling capabilities and their use in Monte Carlo simulation applications.

The selection of physics processes and models to be used in a simulation is one of the most critical tasks of Geant4 experimental applications. Geant4 users are invested of the responsibility of configuring the physics of their simulation, since Geant4 does not provide any default physics settings. The configuration of a user application requires in-depth knowledge of Geant4 physics functionality to identify appropriate processes and models, and understanding of their validity to estimate the reliability and accuracy of the simulation results

This Geant4 simulation domain is by far the most difficult to master, not only for novice users, but also for more experienced ones, due to its intrinsic complexity and the large number of available options in the toolkit.

This Refresher Course reviews Geant4 simulation capabilities and physics modeling options; it summarizes the current status of Geant4 physics validation and provides guidance to deal with Geant4 physics selection in experimental applications.


Geant4

Geant4 is a software toolkit for the simulation of the interaction of particles with matter. It provides functionality for all the typical domains of detector simulation: geometry and material modeling, detector response, run and event management, particle transport, visualisation and user interface. An abundant set of physics processes handle the diverse interactions of particles with matter across a wide energy range, as required by Geant4 multi-disciplinary nature; for many physics processes a choice among different models is available. Geant4 exploits software engineering techniques and the object oriented technology to achieve transparency of the physics implementation, as well as openness to extension and evolution.

Geant4 application areas include high energy physics experiments, astrophysics and astroparticle physics, nuclear physics, space science, medical physics and medical imaging, radiation protection etc.  Geant4 first reference paper has received more than 2000 citations in scholarly literature at the time of this Refresher Course.

Geant4 source code and libraries are freely available, accompanied by extensive user documentation. 


Outline of the lecture


Course material

Slides

Geant4 references:

  1. S. Agostinelli et al., Geant4 - a simulation toolkit, NIM A, vol. 506, no. 3, pp. 250-3031, 2003.
  2. J. Allison et al., Geant4 developments and applications, IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci., vol. 53, no. 1, pp.270-278, 2006.

Geant4 User Documentation


Lecturer

Maria Grazia Pia, INFN Sezione di Genova, Via Dodecaneso 33, 16146 Genova, Italy - Phone: +39 010 353 6328 - Maria.Grazia.Pia at cern.ch

Maria Grazia Pia is a physicist at INFN Genova, Italy. She has been a developer of Geant4 since its R&D phase in the 90's (the RD44 project at CERN) and has contributed to Geant4 physics design, development and validation. She has authored several Geant4-related publications and has given a large number of talks and seminars about Geant4. She launched Geant4 Training Programme and is active in the field of technology transfer from high energy physics to other fields.

M.G. Pia is Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science.


Last update 21 October 2011 - Maria Grazia Pia