Geant4


Geant4 is a platform for "the simulation of the passage of particles through matter" using Monte Carlo methods. It is the successor of the GEANT series of software toolkits developed by The Geant4 collaboration, and the first to use object oriented programming. Its development, maintenance and user support are taken care by the international Geant4 Collaboration. Application areas include high energy physics and nuclear experiments, medical, accelerator and space physics studies. The software is used by a number of research projects around the world.
The Geant4 software and source code is freely available from the project web site; until version 8.1, no specific software license for its use existed; Geant4 is now provided under the .

Features

Geant4 includes facilities for handling geometry, tracking, detector response, run management, visualization and user interface. For many physics simulations, this means less time needs to be spent on the low level details, and researchers can start immediately on the more important aspects of the simulation.
Following is a summary of each of the facilities listed above:
Geant4 can also perform basic histogramming; it requires external analysis tools or software that implements the AIDA framework for exploiting advanced histogramming features.
Since release 10.0, Geant4 implements multithreading, making use of thread-local storage to allow for efficient generation of simulated events in parallel. GEANT4 can be installed under a Unix-based operating system such as MacOS or Linux or under Windows.

Some high energy physics experiments using Geant4

Because of its general purpose nature, Geant4 is well suited for development of computational tools for analysing interactions of particle with matter in many areas. These include: