Physics 392 Fall 2011
Schedule

I will include here relevant readings, documents and links for each lecture. Always under construction! This page is subject to modification as the semester progresses-- often topics can take longer than initially planned, and we may make interesting diversions if opportunities arise. The likely material to be covered can be found here. Readings (if there are any) and more details for a given lecture will appear at a day or two before the lecture, and I may also add notes and links after a given lecture has taken place.

Wednesday, October 5: Lecture 1 Introduction to Monte Carlo Techniques

I will give a generic introduction to Monte Carlo Techniques, including some simple examples, pseudo-random number generation, and Monte Carlo integration techniques.

Some useful references for this lecture and next:

Statistics for Nuclear and Particle Physicists by Louis Lyons, Chapter 6
Numerical Recipes by Press, Teukolsky, Vetterling and Flannery, Chapter 7
The Particle Data Group review on MC techniques; the PDG also has useful summaries of probability and statistics.

Some other links:

Buffon's needle simulation
Diehard tests for randomness.
RANLUX CERNlib routine
TRandom Root routines
WUN2K 1
FAQ 1

Friday, October 5: Lecture 2 Generating Random Numbers from Given Distributions

This lecture will cover techniques for generating random numbers from a given distribution. The "acceptance-rejection" and "inverse transform" methods are the most common and powerful.

Some links:

The Particle Data Group review covers this material, and gives some recipes for particular functions.
The Root TRandom documentation also gives information on Root methods for generating random numbers for different distributions.
UNURAN routines, used by Root
Root script to generate a time series for a constant Poisson rate.
Root script to generate Gaussianly distributed variables using the Box-Muller algorithm.
WUN2K 2
FAQ 2

Wednesday, October 12: Lecture 3 Physics of Particle Detection

References for this material:

Techniques for Nuclear and Particle Physics Experiments by W. R. Leo, an overall excellent reference.
Radiation Detection and Measurement by Glenn F. Knoll.
The passage of particles through matter Particle Data Group review.

In preparation for learning about an important real-life application of Monte Carlo techniques-- detector simulation -- I will cover basic physics of particle energy loss in matter.

The atomic and nuclear properties tables have useful range and stopping power information for different materials.
WUN2K 3
FAQ 3

Friday, October 14: Lecture 4 Basic Detector Simulation Concepts

I will discuss basic concepts and terminology related to detector simulation in particle and nuclear physics, and go through a simplified example.

Wednesday, October 19: Lecture 5 Introduction to Geant4

I will cover the basic tools available in Geant4, and will go through a very simple Geant4 program. We'll discuss how to define a detector geometry, how to specify materials, how to define particles and physics processes, and how to generate primary particles. We may come back to some of these topics in more detail later.

Geant4 publication
Geant4 website
Geant4 User's Guide for Application Developers: this will likely be your most useful document.
Geant4 Hypernews Forum: this is a place to go for help with G4 problems.

Please bring your laptop to class. Here is the Geant4 page with installation instructions. Get version 4.9.4. Linux or MacOSX are best. Geant4 exists for Windows but personally I have no experience with it on that operating system, so I probably won't be able to help you with any issues. So if you have a Windows laptop, you might consider installing on a department Linux machine (and use your laptop to connect remotely). You might also consider this approach if your laptop is very old or slow.

Friday, October 21: Lecture 6 C++ Review; a Further G4 Example

As requested, I will review some basic concepts of object-oriented programming and C++ that are used in Geant4: classes, inheritance, virtual functions. As time permits we'll also start to look at a second example of a G4 program, with sensitive detectors.

Lots of C++ books are available, as well as lots of information online. Here are a few links I found by Googling around:

Wednesday, October 26: Lecture 7 Geant4 Interactive Geometry Example

After discussion of the project, today we'll try out the N03 example, which allows interactive modification of geometry. Bring your laptop.

Friday, October 28: No lecture

Wednesday, November 2: Lecture 8 Interactive Geometry; More on Physics Lists

We'll try again with the interactive geometry example; I will also cover a bit more on physics lists.

Geant4 reference physics lists
Physics lists from SLAC
Slides by Gunter Folger on reference physics lists.
FAQ 8

Physics 392 Fall 2011Schedule