Recent Developments in the FullSimLight Simulation Tool from ATLAS

Abstract

FullSimLight is a lightweight, Geant4-based command line simulation utility intended for studies of simulation performance. It is part of the GeoModel toolkit (geomodel.web.cern.ch) which has been stable for more than one year. The FullSimLight component has recently undergone renewed development aimed at extending its functionality. It has been endowed with a GUI for fast, transparent, and foolproof configuration and with a plugin mechanism allowing users and developers with diverse goals to extend and customize the simulation. Geometry and event input can be easily specified on the fly, allowing rapid evaluation of different geometry options and their effect on simulation performance. User actions and sensitive detectors can also be loaded through the new plugin mechanism, allowing for customization of Geant4 processing and hit production. The geometry explorer (gmex), in a parallel development, has been enhanced with the capability of visualizing FullSimLight track and hit output. FullSimLight, brought to you by the ATLAS collaboration at the LHC, is an experiment independent software tool.