Nuclear spectroscopy with Geant4

The superheavy challenge

Department of Physics, Lund University, 22100 Lund, Sweden

^a e-mail: Luis.Sarmiento@nuclear.lu.se

Published online: 1 December 2016

Abstract

The simulation toolkit Geant4 was originally developed at CERN for high-energy physics. Over the years it has been established as a swiss army knife not only in particle physics but it has seen an accelerated expansion towards nuclear physics and more recently to medical imaging and γ- and ion- therapy to mention but a handful of new applications. The validity of Geant4 is vast and large across many particles, ions, materials, and physical processes with typically various different models to choose from. Unfortunately, atomic nuclei with atomic number Z > 100 are not properly supported. This is likely due to the rather novelty of the field, its comparably small user base, and scarce evaluated experimental data. To circumvent this situation different workarounds have been used over the years. In this work the simulation toolkit Geant4 will be introduced with its different components and the effort to bring the software to the heavy and superheavy region will be described.