Geant4 9.2 Release Notes
December 19th, 2008



The code and binary libraries for the supported systems are available through our Source Code Web page.

We are grateful for the efforts of Geant4 users who have provided detailed feedback, comprehensive reports of issues. We thank in particular those who have contributed corrections, improvements or developments included in this release.

Please refer to the Geant4 User Documentation for further information about using Geant4.

Contents

  1. Supported and Tested Platforms
  2. CLHEP and AIDA
  3. Items for migration of the user code
  4. New Developments and Capabilities
  5. Expected effects on physics and performance
  6. Known Run-Time Problems and Limitations
  7. Compilation Warnings
  8. Known Run-Time Warnings
  9. Geant4 Software License
  10. Detailed list of changes and fixes


1. Supported and Tested Platforms

Official platforms: More verified configurations: Platforms configured but neither tested nor supported:


2. CLHEP and AIDA

Geant4 requires the installation of CLHEP, release 2.0.4.2.
The installation of CLHEP-2.0.4.2 is mandatory for consistency in the definition of masses and widths of particles. Earlier versions of CLHEP may link, but they will not give correct results.

Geant4 9.2 examples with histogramming cowork with analysis tools compliant to AIDA 3.2.1 interfaces (for details, see Appendix 2 of the Users Guide for Application Developers).
AIDA headers can be downloaded from: http://aida.freehep.org


3. Items for migration of the user code

Listed here is some relevant information on developments included in this release, some of which may require migrations (mainly for users of advanced Geant4 features) in order to upgrade from release 9.1 to release 9.2. Note that for all users a full re-installation of libraries (or a full recompilation) and a recompilation of user applications is required.

Geometry

An additional optional Boolean argument has been added to the signature of ComputeSafety() in G4Navigator. Any class inheriting from G4Navigator has to adapt to the new signature.

Particles

Masses and widths of particles have been updated to be compliant with PDG-2008. To maintain consistency this requires the upgrade to a new version of the underlying CLHEP library (CLHEP-2.0.4.2), which includes up-to-date constants as used by Geant4.

Low Energy Electromagnetic physics

Hadronic physics

Data Sets

This release introduces new versions of two data sets. Please see the corresponding details in Section 10 of this document.


4. New Developments and Capabilities

Geometry & Field Detector description persistency Interfaces & Visualization Low Energy Electromagnetic physics Standard Electromagnetic physics Hadronic physics

Physics Lists

Command-based scoring


5. Expected effects on physics and performance

Geometry Low-energy Electromagnetic physics Standard Electromagnetic physics Hadronic physics


6. Known Run-Time Problems and Limitations

Command-based Scoring

The following known issues affect the cylindrical scoring mesh feature and are expected to be fixed in the next release. For a complete list of outstanding run-time problems and to submit any problem you may find while running this version of Geant4, please refer to the Geant4 Problem Reporting System.


7. Compilation Warnings

There may be few compilation warnings on some platforms. We do not believe that any of these lead to incorrect run-time behaviour.


8. Known Run-Time Warnings

The following message can be written to standard output at the end of a program:
    G4Transportation: Statistics for looping particles 
       Sum of energy of loopers killed: 
       Max energy of loopers killed: 
It provides the total energy (in MeV) of tracks killed due to excessive number of steps ('looping') during the simulation, and the maximum energy of such a track. Such behaviour can be due to looping in magnetic fields or encountering problems at geometrical boundaries.

In case either of these reported energies is significant, we recommend increasing the verbosity of G4Transportation to obtain information for each track killed. A user can change the threshold energy above which particles are not killed using the method SetThresholdImportantEnergy of G4Transportation. The default value is 250 MeV.


9. Geant4 Software License

A Software License applies to the Geant4 code. Users must accept this license in order to use it. The details and the list of copyright holders is available at http://cern.ch/geant4/license and also in the text file LICENSE distributed with the source code.


10. Detailed list of changes and fixes

These are the main new features/fixes included in this release since the last patched public release (for more detailed lists of fixes/additions, please refer to the corresponding History files provided in most packages):

Configuration

Digitization & Hits

Electromagnetic Processes

G3toG4

General Processes

Geometry

Global

Graphical Representations

Hadronic Processes

Intercoms

Interfaces

Materials

Particles

Persistency

Physics lists

Track & Tracking

Visualization

Environments

Data sets

Examples