Crystals provide unique physical conditions for various electromagnetic effects involving both high-energy charged particles and photons. A small piece of crystal material could be used as an intense source of X- and gamma-ray radiation, a source of positrons, a beam manipulation instrument, a compact detector and a compact wake-field accelerator as well. Consequently, a crystal could be useful for a wide range of applications in accelerator physics, high-energy frontier physics, nuclear physics, cosmic-ray detectors, dark matter search and radiation therapy.
In particular, this will help to construct the future lepton colliders – multi-billion euro discovery machines opening new horizons in investigation of the fundamental laws of the Universe. It will provide a simple, low-cost and efficient tool of beam manipulation at tens of existing electron synchrotrons, which will considerably speed-up generic detectors R&D and will make available novel very high-energy fixed target experiments at future collider machines as well. In addition, the crystal X- and gamma- radiation source opens up the new perspectives in nuclear spectroscopy, nuclear transmutation and cancer radiation therapy.
The only way to design any application of a crystal is to perform complicated simulations usually requiring High Performance Computing on a supercomputer. The bottleneck is unification of rather marginal crystalline effects simulation codes with big physics packages such as Geant4 widely used for experimental setup design. The implementation of both physics of electromagnetic processes in oriented crystals and the design of specific applications of crystalline effects into Geant4 simulation toolkit as Geant4 examples to bring them to a large scientific and industrial community and under a free Geant4 license is the main objective of this Project.
As the main results, this physics was officially implemented into Geant4 within Geant4 Channeling Fast Simulation Model (G4ChannelingFastSimModel).
