AAAA002 Introduction to the manual

The present documentation is divided into sections which follow the structure of GEANT and its major functions. Each section is identified by a keyword which indicates its content. Sections are in alphabetical order:

AAAA

introduction to the system;

BASE

GEANT framework and user interfaces to be read first;

CONS

particles, materials and tracking medium parameters;

DRAW

the drawing package, interfaced to HIGZ;

GEOM

the geometry package;

HITS

the detector response package;

IOPA

the I/O package;

KINE

event generators and kinematic structures;

PHYS

physics processes;

TRAK

the tracking package;

XINT

interactive user interface;

ZZZZ

appendix.

Within each section, the principal system functions or the details of subroutines are described in a series of papers numbered from 001 to 999. In the upper left corner it is indicated in which Geant release the subroutines were introduced and left unchanged. The authors of the conceptual ideas or/and of the early versions of the code are acknowledged under the item Origin, while Revision contains the contributors to any important upgrade. Documentation is essential, but sometime implies a not negligeable amount of work. When relevant these contributions are acknowledged here. In addition all reported bugs, accepted suggestions...etc...are mentioned in the history part of the source code and correction cradle.

Subroutines which are not necessary for an understanding of the program flow and which are not intended to be called directly by the user have been omitted.

The notation [<KEYW>nnn] is used whenever additional information can be found in the quoted section. In the description of subroutine calling sequences, the arguments used both on input and on output are preceded by a * and the output arguments are followed by a * .

For convenience, two more sections have been added: the section AAAA, for general introductory information at the beginning, and the section ZZZZ, for various appendices and indexed lists, at the end.

A table of contents is available in AAAA000. To ease access to this documentation an index appears in ZZZZ999. It gives in alphabetic order the names of all documented GEANT subroutines with references to the appropriate write up(s).

A short write up of GEANT can be obtained by collecting the papers numbered 001 to 009 in each section.

F.Bruyant

BASE001