Eur. Phys. J. C (2025) 85: 910
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-025-14612-0

Regular Article - Experimental Physics

Performance of an optical TPC Geant4 simulation with opticks GPU-accelerated photon propagation

¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Iowa State University, 50011-3160, Ames, IA, USA
² Argonne National Laboratory, 60439, Argonne, IL, USA
³ Department of Physics, University of Texas at Arlington, 76019, Arlington, TX, USA
⁴ Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Texas at Arlington, 76019, Arlington, TX, USA
⁵ Institute of Nanostructures, Nanomodelling and Nanofabrication (i3N), Universidade de Aveiro, Campus de Santiago, 3810-193, Aveiro, Portugal
⁶ Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, 60510, Batavia, IL, USA
⁷ Unit of Nuclear Engineering, Faculty of Engineering Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O.B. 653, 8410501, Beer-Sheva, Israel
⁸ Ikerbasque (Basque Foundation for Science), 48009, Bilbao, Spain
⁹ Department of Physics, Universidad del Pais Vasco (UPV/EHU), PO Box 644, 48080, Bilbao, Spain
¹⁰ Department of Physics, Harvard University, 02138, Cambridge, MA, USA
¹¹ Laboratorio Subterráneo de Canfranc, Paseo de los Ayerbe s/n, 22880, Canfranc Estación, Spain
¹² Case Western Reserve University, 44106, Cleveland, OH, USA
¹³ LIBPhys, Physics Department, University of Coimbra, Rua Larga, 3004-516, Coimbra, Portugal
¹⁴ LIP, Department of Physics, University of Coimbra, 3004-516, Coimbra, Portugal
¹⁵ Department of Physics, University of Texas at El Paso, 79968, El Paso, TX, USA
¹⁶ Escola Politècnica Superior, Universitat de Girona, Av. Montilivi, s/n, 17071, Girona, Spain
¹⁷ Racah Institute of Physics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 9190401, Jerusalem, Israel
¹⁸ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Manchester University, M13 9PL, Manchester, UK
¹⁹ Wright Laboratory, Department of Physics, Yale University, 06520, New Haven, CT, USA
²⁰ Instituto de Física Corpuscular (IFIC), CSIC and Universitat de València, Calle Catedrático José Beltrán, 2, 46980, Paterna, Spain
²¹ Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), 99352, Richland, WA, USA
²² Centro de Física de Materiales (CFM), CSIC and Universidad del Pais Vasco (UPV/EHU), Manuel de Lardizabal 5, 20018, San Sebastián/Donostia, Spain
²³ Department of Organic Chemistry I, Universidad del Pais Vasco (UPV/EHU), Centro de Innovación en Química Avánzada (ORFEO-CINQA), 20018, San Sebastián/Donostia, Spain
²⁴ Department of Applied Chemistry, Universidad del Pais Vasco (UPV/EHU), Manuel de Lardizabal 3, 20018, San Sebastián/Donostia, Spain
²⁵ Donostia International Physics Center, BERC Basque Excellence Research Centre, Manuel de Lardizabal 4, 20018, San Sebastián/Donostia, Spain
²⁶ Instituto Gallego de Física de Altas Energías, Univ. de Santiago de Compostela, Campus sur, Rúa Xosé María Suárez Núñez, s/n, 15782, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
²⁷ Instituto de Instrumentación para Imagen Molecular (I3M), Centro Mixto CSIC-Universitat Politècnica de València, Camino de Vera s/n, 46022, Valencia, Spain
²⁸ Now at Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
²⁹ NEXT Spokesperson, New York, USA
³⁰ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA
³¹ Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, USA

Received: 20 February 2025
Accepted: 6 August 2025
Published online: 28 August 2025

Abstract

We investigate the performance of Opticks, a NVIDIA OptiX API 7.5 GPU-accelerated photon propagation tool compared with a single-threaded Geant4 simulation. We compare the simulations using an improved model of the NEXT-CRAB-0 gaseous time projection chamber. Performance results suggest that Opticks improves simulation speeds by between $58.47\pm 0.02$ and $181.39\pm 0.28$ times relative to a CPU-only Geant4 simulation and these results vary between different types of GPU and CPU. A detailed comparison shows that the number of detected photons, along with their times and wavelengths, are in good agreement between Opticks and Geant4.