Ants3 toolkit: front-end for Geant4 with interactive GUI and Python scripting

Abstract

Ants3 is a toolkit that serves as a front-end for particle simulations in Geant4 and offers a custom simulator for optical photons. It features a fully interactive Graphical User Interface and an extensive scripting system based on general-purpose scripting languages (Python and JavaScript). Ants3 covers the entire detector simulation/optimization cycle, providing an intuitive approach for configuration of the geometry and simulation conditions, the possibility to automatically distribute workload over local and network resources, and giving a suite of versatile tools based on CERN ROOT for the analysis of the results. The intended application area is the development of new detectors and readout methods. The toolkit has been designed to be user-friendly for those with little experience in simulations and programming.