GEANT applications

The GEANT program simulates the passage of elementary particles through the matter. Originally designed for the High Energy Physics experiments, it has today found applications also outside this domain in areas such as medical and biological sciences, radio-protection and astronautics.

The principal applications of GEANT in High Energy Physics are:

• the transport of particles ( tracking in this manual) through an experimental setup for the simulation of detector response;
• the graphical representation of the setup and of the particle trajectories.

The two functions are combined in the interactive version of GEANT. This is very useful, since the direct observation of what happens to a particle inside the detector makes the debugging easier and may reveal possible weakness of the setup (also sometimes of the program!).

In view of these applications, the GEANT system allows you to:

• describe an experimental setup by a structure of geometrical volumes. A MEDIUM number is assigned to each volume by the user ( [GEOM]). Different volumes may have the same medium number. A medium is defined by the so-called TRACKING MEDIUM parameters, which include reference to the MATERIAL filling the volume [CONS];
• accept events simulated by Monte Carlo generators [KINE];
• transport particles through the various regions of the setup, taking into account geometrical volume boundaries and physical effects according to the nature of the particles themselves, their interactions with matter and the magnetic field [TRAK], [PHYS];
• record particle trajectories and the response of the sensitive detectors [TRAK], [HITS];
• visualise the detectors and the particle trajectories [DRAW], [XINT].

The program contains dummy and default user subroutines called whenever application-dependent actions are expected.

It is the responsibility of the user to:

• code the relevant user subroutines providing the data describing the experimental environment;
• assemble the appropriate program segments and utilities into an executable program;
• compose the appropriate data records which control the execution of the program.

Note: the names of the dummy or default user subroutines have GU or UG as their first two letters.