Speaker
B. White
(STANFORD LINEAR ACCELERATOR CENTER (SLAC))
Description
The Electron Gamma Shower (EGS) Code System at SLAC is designed to simulate the flow
of electrons, positrons and photons through matter at a wide range of energies. It
has a large user base among the high-energy physics community and is often used as a
teaching tool through a Web interface that allows program input and output. Our work
aims to improve the user interaction and shower visualization model of the EGS Web
interface. Currently, manipulation of the graphical output (a GIF file) is limited
to simple operations like panning and zooming, and each such operation requires
server-side calculations. We use SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) to allow a much
richer set of operations, letting users select a track and visualize it with the aid
of 3-D rotations, adjustable particle display intensities, and interactive display
of the interactions happening over time. A considerable advantage of our method is
that once a track is selected for visualization, all further manipulations on that
track can be done client-side without requiring server-side calculations. We hence
combine the advantages of the SVG format (powerful interaction models over the Web)
with those of conventional image formats (file size independent of scene complexity)
to allow a composite set of operations for users, and enhance the value of EGS as a
pedagogical tool.
Authors
B. White
(STANFORD LINEAR ACCELERATOR CENTER (SLAC))
K. Shrivastava
(Stanford Linear Accelerator Center/Stanford University)
R. Cowan
(Stanford Linear Accelerator Center)
