SimpleGeo – New Developments in the Interactive Creation and Debugging of Geometries for Monte Carlo Simulations

Nowadays radiation transport Monte Carlo simulations have become an indispensable tool in various fields of physics. The applications are diversified and range from physics simulations, like detector studies or shielding design, to medical applications. Usually a significant amount of time is spent on the quite cumbersome and often error prone task of implementing geometries, before the actual physics studies can be performed. SimpleGeo is an interactive solid modeler which allows for the interactive creation and visualization of geometries for various Monte Carlo particle transport codes in 3D. Even though visual validation of the geometry is important, it might not reveal subtle errors like overlapping or undefined regions. These might eventually corrupt the execution of the simulation or even lead to incorrect results, the latter being sometimes hard to identify. In many cases a debugger is provided by the Monte Carlo package, but most often they lack interactive visual feedback, thus making it hard for the user to localize and correct the error. In this paper we describe the latest developments in SimpleGeo, which include debugging facilities that support immediate visual feedback, and apply various algorithms based on deterministic, Monte Carlo or Quasi Monte Carlo methods. These approaches allow for a fast and robust identification of subtle geometry errors that are also marked visually.