Garfield++

Garfield++ is a toolkit for the detailed simulation of detectors which use gases or semi-conductors as sensitive medium. The main area of application is currently in micropattern gaseous detectors.

Garfield++ shares functionality with Garfield. The main differences are the more up-to-date treatment of electron transport in gases, the inclusion of semiconductor detectors and the user interface, which is derived from ROOT.

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Building the project

Options

GARFIELD_WITH_CUDA: Build CUDA code if possible OFF by default

GARFIELD_CUDA_USE_FLOAT: Use float with CUDA code (for some performances issues on some hardware)" double by default

GARFIELD_WITH_DEGRADE: Build Degrade ON by default

GARFIELD_WITH_EXAMPLES: Build Garfield++ examples ON by default

GARFIELD_WITH_TESTS: Build Garfield++ tests ON by default

For simplicity, we define an environment variable $GARFIELD_HOME pointing to the directory to which we cloned the repository. Assuming that $GARFIELD_HOME is your current working directory, you can build and install Garfield++ as follows:

    mkdir build
    cd build
    cmake [-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<installdir>] [-DGARFIELD_WITH_DOC=ON] [-DGARFIELD_WITH_EXAMPLES=ON] <path to sources>
    make -j<number of cores on your machine>
    make install

If CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX is not provided in the configuration command, $GARFIELD_HOME/install will be used as installation prefix. The GARFIELD_WITH_DOC variable is optional, and should be passed if you wish to build the Doxygen based API documentation. Please note that this requires an existing installation of Doxygen. If CMake cannot locate Doxygen, its install location should be added into CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH. For further details please have a look at the CMake tutorial.

Building the documentation

The documentation of the project is based on doxygen. To build the documentation, the project must have been configured with GARFIELD_WITH_DOC enabled, as described earlier. It can then be built and installed:

    make doc
    make install

By default, this installs the documentation into <installdir>/share/doc/HSFTEMPLATE/share/doc.

Running the examples

You can run the examples from the build directory (if WITH_EXAMPLES has been turned on) but you need to setup a running environment defining some variables, in particular for the HEED database.

In the following lines we use the GEM example (assuming that the build folder is our current working directory):

source setupGarfield.sh
cd Examples/Gem
./gem

Alternatively, thanks to PyROOT, you can use the Garfield++ classes from Python`. Assuming again that the build folder is our current working directory we can run the GEM example like this:

source setupGarfield.sh
cd Examples/Gem
python3 -i gem.py

Building and running examples using an installed version of Garfield

Make sure that all required environment variables are set by sourcing the script setupGarfield.sh:

source $GARFIELD_HOME/install/share/Garfield/setupGarfield.sh

To get started, it can be useful to copy one of the examples to a local directory, modify it, build it against an installed version of Garfield and run it.

cp -r $GARFIELD_HOME/Examples/Gem .
mkdir Gem/build; cd Gem/build
cmake ..
make
./gem

Inclusion into other projects

If you want to build your own project against Garfield, CMake may be the best option for you. Just add its location to CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH and call find_package(Garfield) within your CMakeLists.txt.

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.12 FATAL_ERROR)
project(test)

if(NOT TARGET Garfield::Garfield)
  find_package(Garfield REQUIRED)
endif()

add_executable(test test.C)
target_link_libraries(test Garfield::Garfield)