DagSolid: a new Geant4 solid class for fast simulation in polygon-mesh geometry

Abstract

Even though a computer-aided design (CAD)-based geometry can be directly implemented in Geant4 as polygon-mesh using the G4TessellatedSolid class, the computation speed becomes very slow, especially when the geometry is composed of a large number of facets. To address this problem, in the present study, a new Geant4 solid class, named DagSolid, was developed based on the direct accelerated geometry for the Monte Carlo (DAGMC) library which provides the ray-tracing acceleration algorithm functions. To develop the DagSolid class, the new solid class was derived from the G4VSolid class, and its ray-tracing functions were linked to the corresponding functions of the DAGMC library. The results of this study show that the use of the DagSolid class drastically improves the computation speed. The improvement was more significant when there were more facets, meaning that the DagSolid class can be used more effectively for complicated geometries with many facets than for simple geometries. The maximum difference of computation speed was 1562 and 680 times for Geantino and ChargedGeantino, respectively. For real particles (gammas, electrons, neutrons, and protons), the difference of computation speed was less significant, but still was within the range of 53-685 times depending on the type of beam particles simulated.