Software/Geant4

Geant4

GEANT4 is a toolkit for simulating the passage of particles through matter. You can use GEANT4 by creating your own simulation applications using the available GEANT4 tools.

• Introduction to GEANT4 will help you understand the basics of GEANT4 and the necessary ingredients to write your own application.
• Useful links:
  • Geant4 User's Guide for Application Developers
  • Physics Reference Manual
  • GEANT4 Classes
  • GEANT4 hypernews
  • Geant4 Cross Reference
  • Frequently Asked Questions

This is a tutorial about applications of GEANT4 to medical physics. GEANT4 is installed on the HEP Linux cluster at UCL. You will need an account on that cluster to be able to use this software, run example tutorials and create your own applications.

Running Geant4 Simulations

In order to run Geant4 simulations, you will either need to download and install the software yourself or source Geant4 over CVMFS via he UCL HEP Linux cluster. (There is an existing installation on the UCL HEP Linux cluster, however this version 10.3).

In order to use the UCL HEP Linux cluster, you will need a HEP account: please contact Prof. Simon Jolly for more details.

For more information on using Geant4 on the HEP Linux cluster, see the UCL HEP Linux Cluster page.

Input files for Geant4 are simply plain text files than can be edited with your preferred text editor. For remote editing on multiple platforms, it is possible to use the Eclipse IDE: for instructions on using Eclipse to edit files over SSH, see the PBTWiki Eclipse page.

To submit Geant4 jobs to the HEP Linux cluster, see the UCL HEP Batch Farm page.

In order to install your own version of Geant4, you will need to download and compile the course code from the CERN Geant4 website.

Extensive instructions have been put together describing how to compile the code yourself. The best place to start is the Geant4 Installation page.

Full instructions for installing Geant4 on MacOS can be found here.

Tutorials

A number of tutorials are available to help you get started running your own simulations. It is recommended that novice users make use of these simulations as templates to construct their own.

There are tutorials available to help you getting started in running simulations with Geant4 over the UCL HEP Linux Cluster via CVMFS (recommended):

• Basic PBT Tutorials introduce the rudiments of Geant4 for proton therapy simulations: these are described in more detail on the Basic PBT Tutorials.

There are also two sets of tutorials available using the older version Geant4 (10.2) that's installed on the UCL HEP Linux Cluster (only use if absolutely necessary):

• The Basic Tutorials introduce the rudiments of Geant4 for proton therapy simulations: these are described in more detail on the Basic Tutorials page.
• The Advanced Tutorials describe more sophisticated proton therapy simulations in Geant4: more information can be found on the Advanced Tutorials page.

Data Analysis Software

These tutorials use ROOT to analyse data. Useful links:

• ROOT User's Guide
• ROOT Primer
• ROOT tutorials

Similarly, data can be analysed using MATLAB. This is a link to interactive introduction to MATLAB:

• MATLAB introduction