ROBAST: Development of a ROOT-Based Ray-Tracing Library for Cosmic-Ray Telescopes and its Applications in the Cherenkov Telescope Array

TL;DR

ROBAST is an open-source, ROOT-based ray-tracing library designed for optical simulations in cosmic-ray and gamma-ray telescopes, facilitating complex geometry modeling and widely used in CTA telescope development.

Contribution

It introduces a versatile, open-source ray-tracing tool built on ROOT, enabling efficient optical simulations for multiple telescope designs in cosmic-ray experiments.

Findings

Successfully used for CTA telescope simulations

Supports complex optical geometries

Facilitates development of light concentrators

Abstract

We have developed a non-sequential ray-tracing simulation library, ROOT-based simulator for ray tracing (ROBAST), which is aimed to be widely used in optical simulations of cosmic-ray (CR) and gamma-ray telescopes. The library is written in C++, and fully utilizes the geometry library of the ROOT framework. Despite the importance of optics simulations in CR experiments, no open-source software for ray-tracing simulations that can be widely used in the community has existed. To reduce the dispensable effort needed to develop multiple ray-tracing simulators by different research groups, we have successfully used ROBAST for many years to perform optics simulations for the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). Among the six proposed telescope designs for CTA, ROBAST is currently used for three telescopes: a Schwarzschild-Couder (SC) medium-sized telescope, one of SC small-sized telescopes, and a large-sized telescope (LST). ROBAST is also used for the simulation and development of hexagonal light concentrators proposed for the LST focal plane. Making full use of the ROOT geometry library with additional ROBAST classes, we are able to build the complex optics geometries typically used in CR experiments and ground-based gamma-ray telescopes. We introduce ROBAST and its features developed for CR experiments, and show several successful applications for CTA.