Description
You want to know what happens when a particle crosses a slab of material: does it scatter, spawn secondaries, or leave how much energy in the detector? Pencil and paper will not tell you, only simulation will. Geant4 is the open-source toolkit built for exactly that, written in C++: you describe the detector geometry, pick the physics, and it follows each particle step by step.
It grew out of high-energy physics experiments and is maintained by an international collaboration around CERN, but its uses have long left the collider: accelerators, nuclear physics, space environments, and medical imaging and radiotherapy dose studies. It is a toolkit, not a ready-made program; there is no point-and-click interface, you write code to build your own experiment. This entry is 11.4.3, a large package, so the download link goes to the official page.
Geometry modeling:Build the 3D geometry of complex detectors and scenes in code.
Physics process library:Choose and combine electromagnetic, hadronic, optical and other processes as needed.
Particle tracking:Follows each particle step by step, recording interactions and energy deposits.
Visualization:Draws the geometry and particle tracks so you can check the model for mistakes.
Multithreading:Processes events in parallel to shorten large simulations.
Open source:Free to use and extend for your own research.
It grew out of high-energy physics experiments and is maintained by an international collaboration around CERN, but its uses have long left the collider: accelerators, nuclear physics, space environments, and medical imaging and radiotherapy dose studies. It is a toolkit, not a ready-made program; there is no point-and-click interface, you write code to build your own experiment. This entry is 11.4.3, a large package, so the download link goes to the official page.
Features
Geometry modeling:Build the 3D geometry of complex detectors and scenes in code.
Physics process library:Choose and combine electromagnetic, hadronic, optical and other processes as needed.
Particle tracking:Follows each particle step by step, recording interactions and energy deposits.
Visualization:Draws the geometry and particle tracks so you can check the model for mistakes.
Multithreading:Processes events in parallel to shorten large simulations.
Open source:Free to use and extend for your own research.
Screenshots
Tags:physics-simulation