SimLUCID-lite

A pre-framework GEANT4 simulation of the LUCID experiment.

Introduction

Welcome! This is the GitHub repo for the GEANT4 simulation of the Langton Ultimate Cosmic ray Intensity Detector (LUCID) experiment. This code was used to generate the results featured in the CERN@school paper:

• T. Whyntie and M. A. Harrison, J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 513 022038

i.e. the proceedings from the corresponding conference presentation at the 20th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics, a.k.a. CHEP 2013.

Disclaimers

• This code dates from 2013. While every attempt has been made to ensure that it is usable, some work may be required to get it running on your own particular system. Unfortunately CERN@school cannot guarantee support for this. Please proceed at your own risk.
• This repository is now deprecated, and remains here for legacy purposes. For future work regarding LUCID and CERN@school, please refer to the Institute for Research in Schools (IRIS) GitHub repository. Please also feel free to fork and modify this code as required for your own research.

Acknowledgements

CERN@school was supported by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) via grant numbers ST/J000256/1 and ST/N00101X/1, as well as a Special Award from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. The CERN@school Collaboration would also like to acknowledge the support provided by the GridPP Collaboration in terms of both computing resources and technical guidance from collaboration members.

Installation instructions

Operating system and environment

We run SimLUCID (lite) on Xubuntu 13.04. If it's easier for you, you can run a Xubuntu 13.04 virtual machine on Windows using VirtualBox.

Prerequisite software

You will need to install the following software on your system:

• Python
• ROOT
• GEANT4

Make a note of where your installations are located. For example, I keep my ROOT installation here:

cd $ROOTSYS # change directory to my ROOT installation directory.
pwd # print the working directory, which is:
> /home/alovelace/software/root-v5-34

and my GEANT4 installation here:

cd $GEANT4INSTALLDIR
pwd
> /home/alovelace/software/geant4.9.6.p02-install/

You will need these for configuring SimLUCID later.

Getting the code from GitHub

To clone the SimLUCID-lite repository to your system open a terminal shell and type the following commands.

cd $WORKINGDIR # environment variable for your working directory,
               # i.e. change directory to your working directory.
git clone https://github.com/CERNatschool/SimLUCID-lite
cd SimLUCID-lite

Advanced users may wish to fork the SimLUCID-lite repo so that you can play with the code and commit your own changes to your GitHub account. Go for it!

Building SimLUCID

Now that you have the SimLUCID-lite code on your ROOT- and GEANT4-ready system, you're ready to "build" the SimLUCID-lite executable (i.e. the file that will actually perform the simulation).

There are two shell scripts that must be generated in order to setup the working environment and build the SimLUCID program. These are:

• setup.sh: sets up the environment variables;
• buildandmake.sh: builds the SimLUCID program.

These are not included with the code from GitHub; rather, the Python script configure.py creates these for you with arguments you supply:

python configure.py $ROOTSYS $GEANT4INSTALLDIR
> # output from the script
cd simlucid-build

Then run the setup script to set the required environment variables:

source setup.sh # Run the setup script

Then build and make SimLUCID:

source buildandmake.sh #

(You can take a look at these scripts to see what they're doing, if you like.)

Testing

If you're running on Xubuntu and have OpenInventor installed, you should be able to run the visualisation example provided:

./SimLucid visualtest.in

Alternatively, you can run the simulation in batch mode using the following example:

./SimLucid batchtest.in

Physics analysis using SimLUCID

To start to investigate the physics, you can look at the ROOT files produced by the simulation:

• timepix.root
• pseudodet.root

Further information can be found in the CHEP 2013 paper referenced below.

Useful links

• The Institute for Research in Schools (IRIS) homepage;
• The IRIS CERN@school website;
• The Official IRIS GitHub Organization;
• The CHEP 2013 presentation on SimLUCID-lite;
• The CHEP 2013 conference proceedings (JINST, Open Access);
• The CERN@school Document Index.