Ants3 toolkit: front-end for Geant4 with interactive GUI and Python scripting

TL;DR

Ants3 is an interactive front-end toolkit for Geant4 that simplifies detector simulation and optimization through a GUI and scripting, supporting optical photon simulation and distributed computing.

Contribution

It introduces a user-friendly, scriptable interface with GUI for Geant4, including optical photon simulation and distributed workload management.

Findings

Supports full detector simulation/optimization cycle

Enables easy configuration of geometry and conditions

Provides tools for result analysis with CERN ROOT

Abstract

Ants3 is a toolkit that serves as a front-end for particle simulations in Geant4 and offers a custom simulator for optical photons. It features a fully interactive Graphical User Interface and an extensive scripting system based on general-purpose scripting languages (Python and JavaScript). Ants3 covers the entire detector simulation/optimization cycle, providing an intuitive approach for configuration of the geometry and simulation conditions, the possibility to automatically distribute workload over local and network resources, and giving a suite of versatile tools based on CERN ROOT for the analysis of the results. The intended application area is the development of new detectors and readout methods. The toolkit has been designed to be user-friendly for those with little experience in simulations and programming.