Gaseous particle detectors are a commonly deployed technology in particle physics and beyond due to their flexibility, scalability, and cost compared to alternatives. They play an important role in many fundamental physics experiments from small-scale detectors such as the tabletop sized MIGDAL experiment all the way to large-scale experiments such as the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC.
The path to detailed understanding of gaseous detectors is through detailed computer simulations. The goal of GaGARin was to bring together existing simulation technologies into a powerful, flexible, and fully validated simulation framework for gaseous detectors. To do this the project combined two simulation toolkits, Geant4, which is primarily concerned with the interactions of particles in matter and widely used in fundamental research, biology, and industry, and Garfield++, a simulation toolkit primarily dedicated to the study of gaseous based detectors. The combination of these toolkits, along with others such as finite element modelling software, allows the framework delivered by GaGARin to be used for a wide range of exciting studies, such as optimising micro-pattern gas detectors, performing neutron spectroscopy, and searching for dark matter (DM).
GaGARin is made more powerful with hardware acceleration technologies, namely graphics processing units (GPUs). GPUs were originally designed to render computer graphics, such as those in video games, however, more recently they have been found to be extremely powerful in other fields such as scientific computing and artificial intelligence. To take advantage of this a major objective of GaGARin was to add GPU support to a core algorithm of Garfield++, which simulates particle movement in the detector and their collisions with the atoms of the gas. This will enable advanced computations to be performed and existing computations to run much faster, allowing them to converge on results more quickly.
The final research objective of GaGARin was to use the simulation framework that was developed, including GPU support, in a variety of settings, such as rare-event searches, detector optimisation and neutron spectroscopy. The simulation framework was used in each of these settings, with simulations performed by the GaGARin project being used towards the design of the DarkSPHERE dark matter search experiment, in the MIGDAL experiment aiming for the unambiguous observation of the Migdal effect, in direct DM searches by the NEWS-G collaboration; and in neutron spectroscopy with spherical proportional counters.
