Getting started with Geant4 - theory and practice

Europe/Zurich
Universidad Nacional

Universidad Nacional

Heredia, Costa Rica
Description

ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย 

Tutorial on Geant4 for users interested to begin or improve their usage of Geant4. Appropriate for creating applications in any domain, with emphasis on topics most relevant to experiments in High Energy or Nuclear Physics. This is a hands-on tutorial course based on Geant4 version 11.2.

Lectures will cover all aspects of Geant4 from the basic building blocks of Geant4ย through intermediate topics, interspersed with examples that build a progressively more complex application extensible to real use.

The course is expected to be of interest to novices and those with basic or partial familiarity with Geant4. Participants are expected to have a beginner-level knowledge of C++.

Registration

Registration is undertaken by the host institution, the Universidad Nacional, Heredia, Costa Rica.

Preinstallation of Geant4 is Required

A number of desktop PCs will be provided for use by participants. The Geant4 Virtual Machine will be install on these.

Users are invited to bring a laptop capable of running Geant4, equipped with an internet connection.

To use your laptop for the whole course, it will need a minimum of 35GB free disk space to install theย Geant4 Virtual Machine ; the minimum amount of RAM is 4 GB.ย Participants are encouraged to arrive with a working installation of Geant4.

A dedicated virtual session will be organised to exercise the remote connection and to check the installation of Geant4 and related libraries, to ensure it is working correctly and to address questions or difficulties.

The Geant4 Virtual Machineย (see instructions) will be the only supported installation of Geant4. Users will need to have installed on their machine either before the course or during the first day of the course, so that they can undertake the exercises in an environment which supports all necessary functionality.

An additional, alternative installation can be created by users, with native compilers. Supported systems and C++ compilers for this are listed in the Geant4 Installation Guide. If you have questions about whether your machine is appropriate, or problems about installing Geant4, see the Geant4 Installation Guide, and/or the Geant4 Installation and Configuration Discussion Forum.

Pre-requisites:ย 

  • Basic knowledge of the C++ languageย 
  • Basic knowledge of MC simulation techniquesย 
  • Availability of a machine with Virtual Machine pre-installed

Objectives:ย 

  • Acquire basic understanding of particle transport Monte Carlo
  • Acquire basic knowledge and experience in using the Geant4 simulation toolkit
Organised by

CERN Technical Training

Geant4 Training 2024
    • 1
      Introduction: What is Geant4 ?

      The toolkit / library 'nature' of Geant4 and how differ from radiation transport tools ?

      Is there is no Geant4 'executable' ? If not, why ?
      Variety of existing Geant4-based application / tools.
      How do you use Geant4 ?

      Speaker: John Apostolakis (CERN)
    • 10:30
      Break
    • 2
      Hands-on: First look at virtual machine and one Geant4 application

      Goals:
      - Familiarise with program main, contents of directories, compiling and running an executable

      How to get the exercise material

      You can follow these instructions from the gitlab site of the exercises below "How to get the exercises"

      Copied below also (in case of gitlab unavailability)

      First create a directory for all our work (examples & exercises) :
      Create a new ~/g4/exercises directory, and extract it there:

      cd ~
      mkdir g4
      cd g4
      mkdir exercises
      cd exercises

      Download the file below (Day1-v2.tar) to your G4 virtual machine using firefox.

      Note: Don't open it - just save it (in Downloads)

      tar xf ~/Downloads/Day1-v2.tar
      ls

      Then check it more:
      cd day1
      ls

      Speaker: John Apostolakis (CERN)
    • 12:15
      Lunch Break
    • 3
    • 4
      Describing your detector - Concepts
      Speaker: John Apostolakis (CERN)
    • 5
      Hands on: Adding volumes to the world
      Speaker: John Apostolakis (CERN)
    • 6
      Questions & Answers plus Homework
    • 16:15
      Adjourn
    • 17:00
      Home work
    • 7
      Review of homework
      • Start where we finished on Day1
      • Follow-up concepts from homework - extended concepts
      • Reset set-up of hands-on
      Speaker: John Apostolakis (CERN)
    • 8
      Visualisation - lecture & hands-on
      • Visualise your detector geometry

      Brief overview and hands-on exercises

      Speakers: John Apostolakis (CERN), Mihaly Novak (CERN)
    • 11:05
      Break
    • 9
      Materials - lecture & hands-on
      • Definition of materials and association to detector volumes
      Speaker: John Apostolakis (CERN)
    • 10
      Applications of Geant4
      Speaker: John Apostolakis (CERN)
    • 11
      Generation of primaries - lecture & hands-on
      Speaker: John Apostolakis (CERN)
    • 15:25
      Adjourn
    • 17:00
      Home work
    • 12
      Review of homework - questions & answers
      Speakers: John Apostolakis (CERN), Mihaly Novak (CERN), Vladimir Ivantchenko (CERN)
    • 13
      Extracting information - part 1: User Actions
      Speaker: Mihaly Novak (CERN)
    • 14
      Hands on
      • Finding information in G4Step, G4Track
      • Creating Sensitive Detector ProcessHits() method that extract energy deposit
      • Alternative method: Built-in scorer
      Speakers: John Apostolakis (CERN), Mihaly Novak (CERN), Vladimir Ivantchenko (CERN)
    • 11:15
      Coffee break
    • 15
      Hands on (continued)
      • Using actions to collect total energy and track length

      • Alternative: using sensitive detector to collect total energy

      Speakers: John Apostolakis (CERN), Mihaly Novak (CERN)
    • 16
      Extracting information: Part 2 - scoring and hits

      Overview of sensitive detectors and built-in scorers.

      Speaker: John Apostolakis (CERN)
    • 13:15
      Adjourn
    • 14:30
      Home work
      • Extend to divide energy deposition into slices (along thickness)
      • Tracker sensitive detector (store dE, x, y, z)
      • UI commands for similar functionality (optional)
      • Score via stepping action (optiona)
    • 17
      Review of homework - questions & answers
      Speakers: John Apostolakis (CERN), Mihaly Novak (CERN)
    • 18
      Sensitive Detectors
    • 10:30
      Coffee break
    • 19
      Messengers - how to use them and to create one

      Lecture (overview)

      Hands-on exercise

      Speakers: John Apostolakis (CERN), Mihaly Novak (CERN)
    • 12:45
      Lunch Break
    • 20
      Electromagnetic physics

      Lecture (overview)

      Hands-on exercise

      Speaker: Vladimir Ivantchenko (CERN)
    • 14:45
      Installing Geant4 on your system (Optional)

      A short presentation about installing Geant4 on your own system.
      Hands-on help to overcome potential installation issues you face.

    • 17:00
      Home work
      • Continue one of the aspects
      • Study an extended example
    • 21
      Review of homework
      Speaker: John Apostolakis (CERN)
    • 22
      Hadronic physics
      Speaker: John Apostolakis (CERN)
    • 23
      Defining / using magnetic field
      Speaker: John Apostolakis (CERN)
    • 11:10
      Coffee break
    • 24
      Hands-on: magnetic field
      Speaker: John Apostolakis (CERN)
    • 25
      Multi-threading
      Speaker: John Apostolakis (CERN)
    • 26
      Followup topics - questions & answers

      Extension of existing concepts

      Speaker: John Apostolakis (CERN)
    • 13:30
      Adjourn