Including Calorimeter Test Beams in Geant-val—The Physics Validation Testing Suite of Geant4

Abstract

The Geant4 simulation toolkit is currently adopted by many particle physics experiments, including those at the Large Hadron Collider and the ones proposed for future lepton and hadron colliders. In the present era of precision tests for the Standard Model and increasingly detailed detectors proposed for the future colliders scenario, Geant4 plays a key role. It is required to remain a reliable and stable toolkit for detector simulations and at the same time undergo major improvements in both physics accuracy and computational performance. Calorimeter beam tests involve various particles at different energy scales and represent ideal benchmarks for the physics modeling and assessment of Monte Carlo tools for radiation–matter simulation. We present the first results of a broad validation campaign on test beam data targeting data deployment and preservation with geant-val, the Geant4 validation and testing suite. We investigate the Geant4 capability to model the calorimeter response, energy fluctuations, and shower shapes using data from the ATLAS hadronic end-cap calorimeter and the CALICE silicon-tungsten calorimeter. The evolution over the recent years of the recommended set of physics processes for high-energy physics applications is outlined and compared to alternative models for hadronic interactions.