Overview
TODO needs to be rewritten & modernised
It provides a complete set of tools for all areas of detector simulation: geometry, tracking, detector response, run, event and track management, visualization and user interface. The multi-disciplinary nature of the toolkit requires that it supply an abundant set of physics processes to handle diverse interactions of particles with matter over a wide energy range. For many physics processes a choice of different models is available.
A large set of utilities is provided, including a set of physics units and constants, particle management compliant with the Particle Data Group, interfaces to event generators, and object persistency solutions, complete the toolkit.
Geant4 exploits advanced software engineering techniques and object-oriented technology to achieve transparency of the physics implementation and hence provide the possibility of validating the physics results.
User requirements were collected in the initial phase of the project and are periodically updated.
Problem domain decomposition and object-oriented analysis and design have led to a clear hierarchical structure of sub-domains, linked by a uni-directional flow of dependencies.
The object-oriented design of Geant4 allows the user to understand, customize or extend the toolkit in all the domains. At the same time, its modular architecture allows the user to load and use only the components needed.
Geant4 software was developed in the context of the CERN RD44 R&D project, as a world-wide collaboration of about 100 scientists participating in more than 10 experiments in Europe, Russia, Japan, Canada and the United States. The achievements of the development phase are summarized in the RD44 final Status Report (S.Giani et al., CERN/LHCC-98-44, 1998).
The Geant4 source code is freely available, accompanied by an Installation Guide and an extensive set of documentation.
Applications
Geant4 is used in several areas of science, from high energy, nuclear and accelerator physics, to medical and space science. List below includes several examples of application of Geant4 toolkit:
- High Energy Physics
- LHC experiments (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb)
- future experiments (CLIC, ILC, FCC)
- and many others
- Space and Radiation Science
- European Space Agency
- GLAST
- MEGAlib
- Medical Physics
- G4DNA
- G4MED
- G4NAMU
- GAMOS
- GATE
- GHOST
- TOPAS
Publications
The three main reference papers for Geant4 are:
- Recent Developments in Geant4, J. Allison et al., Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A 835 (2016) 186-225
- Geant4 Developments and Applications, J. Allison et al., IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci. 53 (2006) 270-278
- Geant4 - A Simulation Toolkit, S. Agostinelli et al., Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A 506 (2003) 250-303
Validation
TODO short intro about types of validation, geant-val, WG.
TODO: how to figure out how to present all below since it’s not one common system:
- Geant Validation Portal geant-val
- see related: G4-Med
TODO copy https://geant4.web.cern.ch/node/1875
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EM Validation
TODO figure out what is relevant from https://geant4.web.cern.ch/collaboration/workings_groups/electromagnetic/results
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Hadronics validation
TODO copy https://geant4.web.cern.ch/results_publications/physics_validation_and_verification and mostly tables from https://geant4.web.cern.ch/publications_validations/testing_and_validation/verification_references