quick intro to geant4 joseph perl (slac/sccs) g4namu meeting @ aapm minneapolis 22 july 2007

Quick Intro to Geant4

Joseph Perl (SLAC/SCCS)G4NAMU meeting @ AAPM Minneapolis22 July 2007

http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~blaylock/hepex/sm-text-logo.gif

July 22, 2007 Intro to Geant4 - Joseph Perl (SLAC/SCCS) 2

What is Geant4?

• An All Particle Monte-Carlo

• Free

• Flexible

• Object-Oriented (C++)

• You get the source

• Successor of GEANT3,

world-standard for HEP detector simulation.

• Used well beyond HEP: heavy ion physics, CP vi

olation physics, cosmic ray physics, astrophysics,

space science, shielding and medical application

s.


Flexibility of Geant4• In order to meet wide variety of requirements fro

m various application fields, a large degree of fu

nctionality and flexibility are provided.

• Geant4 has many types of geometrical descriptio

ns to describe most complicated and realistic ge

ometries

– CSG, BREP and Boolean solids

– Placement, replica, divided, parameterized, r

eflected and grouped

– XML interface

• Everything is open to the user

– Choice of physics processes/models

– Choice of GUI, Visualization, persistency, his

togramming technologies


Physics in Geant4• It is rather unrealistic to develop a uniform physics model to cover wide variety of

particles and/or wide energy range.

• Much wider coverage of physics comes from mixture of theory-driven,

parameterized, and empirical formulae. Thanks to polymorphism mechanism,

both cross-sections and models (final state generation) can be combined in

arbitrary manners into one particular process.

• Geant4 offers

– EM processes

– Hadronic processes

– Polarization

– Photon/lepton-hadron processes

– Optical photon processes

– Decay processes

– Shower parameterization

– Event biasing techniques

– And you can plug-in more


Geant4 – Its history• Dec ’94 - Project start

• Apr ’97 - First alpha release

• Jul ’98 - First beta release

• Dec ’98 - First Geant4 public release - version 1.0

• …

• June 30th, ’06 - Geant4 version 8.1 release

– July 27th, ’06 - Geant4 8.1-patch01 release

• Dec 15th, ’06 - Geant4 version 8.2 release

– Feb 23rd, ’07 - Geant4 8.2-patch01 release

• May 11th, ’07 - Geant4 version 8.3 release

• June 29th, ’07 - Geant4 version 9.0 release <--- Current Release

• We currently provide two to three public releases every year.

– Bimonthly beta releases are available to the registered beta-testers.


Geant4 Collaboration

Collaborators also from non-member institutions, including

Budker Inst. of PhysicsIHEP Protvino

MEPHI Moscow Pittsburg University

Lebedev

TRIUMF

J.W.GoetheUniversität


http://top25.sciencedirect.com/index.php?subject_area_id=21


http://www.in-cites.com/hotpapers/2004/november04-eng.html

http://www.in-cites.com/hotpapers/2005/jan05-eng.html

http://www.in-cites.com/hotpapers/2005/mar05-eng.html

http://www.in-cites.com/hotpapers/2005/may05-eng.html

http://www.in-cites.com/hotpapers/2005/july05-eng.html

July 22, 2007 Intro to Geant4 - Joseph Perl (SLAC/SCCS) 11Courtesy of S.Incerti (IN2P3/CNRS)


MAXIISS Columbus AMS

EUSO

Bepi Colombo SWIFT

LISA

Smart-2

ACE

INTEGRAL

Astro-E2

JWSTGAIA

Herschel

Cassini

GLAST

XMM-Newton


Cou

rtes

y T

. Ers

mar

k, K

TH

Sto

ckho

lm


Harald Paganetti

GEANT4 based proton dose calculation in a clinical environment: technical aspects, strategies and challenges

References


Some Recent Conferences of Interest• First European Workshop on Monte Carlo Treatment Planning of the European Workgro

up on MCTP

– October 22 - 25, 2006

– Gent, Belgium

– Talks Online at:

http://cdfc00.ugent.be/Ewg-mctp/

• The Japan-Taiwan Symposium on Simulation in Medicine

– December 12 - 15, 2006

– Tsukuba, Japan

• Monte Carlo techniques in radiotherapy and verification : Third McGill International Wor

kshop

– May 28 - June 1, 2007

– McGill University, Montreal, Canada

– Talks Online at:

http://www.medphys.mcgill.ca/~mcworkshop2007/talks/

Step by Step Installation Guides

I maintain a set of step-by-step installation guides for Geant4

for standard, single-user installations in Windows, Mac or Linux.

Versions available for all releases from the last two or three years up to the latest release, 9.0.

The guides have been very popular. Try them out.

http://geant4.slac.stanford.edu/installation

Latest Geant4 TutorialThe latest comprehensive Geant4 tutorial given by the SLAC team was in May 2007.The materials from this five day event provide an excellent structured course that you can pursue at your own pace.Just follow the links from the agenda page.

http://geant4.slac.stanford.edu/SLACTutorial07/agenda.html

Presentation on Event Biasing andVariance Reduction Techniques

Jane Tinslay of the SLAC Geant4 team gave a presentation at the 2007 SLAC Geant4 tutorial that constitutes the best survey to date of the various event biasing and variance reduction techniques available within Geant4.

She has pointed out techniques that even many of the Geant4 developers did not know we had supported.

http://geant4.slac.stanford.edu/SLACTutorial07/EventBiasing.ppt or .pdf

Geant4 Event Biasing

Jane Tinslay, SLAC

May 2007, Geant4 v8.2.p01

Jane Tinslay, SLAC 2

Outline

n Introductionn Built in biasing options

n Primary particle biasingn Radioactive decay biasingn Mars hadronic leading particle biasingn General hadronic leading particle biasingn Hadronic cross section biasingn Geometrical biasing

n Importance samplingn Weight windows & weight cutoff

n User defined biasingn G4WrapperProcessn Uniform bremsstrahlung splitting example

n Recent developmentsn Summary

http://geant4.slac.stanford.edu/tutorial/SLACTutorial07/EventBiasing.ppt

SLAC Tutorial Hands-On Example 5One of the hands-on examples from the SLAC tutorial shows you how to implement Bremsstrahlung Splitting. It is based on an experimental benchmark originally coded for Bruce Faddegon.

http://geant4.slac.stanford.edu/SLACTutorial07/HandsOn5/HandsOn5.htm

Splitting factor = 100No splitting

ScoringGeometry

Uniform Bremsstrahlung Splitting

quick intro to geant4 joseph perl (slac/sccs) g4namu meeting @ aapm minneapolis 22 july 2007

Documents

geant4 version

geant4 joseph perl slacsccs2

patch01 release

alpha release

beta release

cp violation physics

cosmic ray physics

heavy ion physics