Geant4 User's Guide For Application Developers Geometry

The detector definition requires the representation of its geometrical elements, their materials and electronics properties, together with visualization attributes and user defined properties. The geometrical representation of detector elements focuses on the definition of solid models and their spatial position, as well as their logical relations to one another, such as in the case of containment.

Geant4 uses the concept of "Logical Volume" to manage the representation of detector element properties. The concept of "Physical Volume" is used to manage the representation of the spatial positioning of detector elements and their logical relations. The concept of "Solid" is used to manage the representation of the detector element solid modeling.

The Geant4 solid modeler is STEP compliant. STEP is the ISO standard defining the protocol for exchanging geometrical data between CAD systems. This is achieved by standardizing the representation of solid models via the EXPRESS object definition language, which is part of the STEP ISO standard.