SPIROS: Streamlined, Precise, Intuitive, and Rapid Optical Simulator for particle physics detectors

Abstract

This paper presents SPIROS (Streamlined, Precise, Intuitive, and Rapid Optical Simulator), a dedicated optical simulation tool developed for the design and analysis of particle physics detectors. Unlike general-purpose frameworks such as GEANT4, SPIROS offers a lightweight simulation engine and a user-friendly interface optimized for optical processes, including scintillation, Cherenkov emission, and photon transport with reflection, refraction, scattering, absorption, and detection. Detector geometries can be directly imported from 3D CAD models, and all configurations including materials, surfaces, sources, and sensors are specified via a single human-readable input file. Validation against GEANT4 shows excellent agreement in photon generation and propagation behaviors, while benchmark tests demonstrate that SPIROS runs more than two times faster for typical detector configurations. The software has already been applied to multiple neutrino experiments, including T2K, NINJA, and AXEL, for detector design, performance studies, and optimization. SPIROS is open-source and freely available at https://github.com/tkikawa/spiros.

References in corpus (7)

• The T2K Experiment
• Measurements of the T2K neutrino beam properties using the INGRID on-axis near detector
• A fully active fine grained detector with three readout views
• Electroluminescence collection cell as a readout for a high energy resolution Xenon gas TPC
• First neutrino event detection with nuclear emulsion at J-PARC neutrino beamline
• Design and performance of a scintillation tracker for track matching in nuclear-emulsion-based neutrino interaction measurement
• Development and performance evaluation of a water-based liquid scintillator tracking detector with wavelength-shifting fiber readout