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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 14: Data, AI, Computing, Electronics II

T 14.5: Talk

Monday, March 16, 2026, 17:15–17:30, KH 02.014

Theia - A General Photon Propagation Framework for GPUs — •Tobias Kerscher — Technical University of Munich

In neutrino telescopes, understanding how light produced by neutrino interactions via Cherenkov radiation propagates through the detector volume is essential. Due to its complexity this is usually done using Monte Carlo simulations. Using popular tools like GEANT4, however, this often turns out to be the most time consuming step in the overall simulation pipeline and thus becomes a bottleneck. Theia aims to solve this by not only running on GPUs, but also utilizing hardware accelerated ray tracing for fast and accurate intersections with the detector geometry. Since it uses an open standard GPU API, it is not limited to CUDA and NVIDIA hardware. Besides the classical photon tracking simulation, it can also solve for the radiance field producing the underlying expected signal distribution the tracking implicitly samples from. Theia was designed with expendability in mind, making minimal assumptions about the simulated environment. This allows it to be used in various scenarios not limited to neutrino telescopes.

Keywords: Monte Carlo simulation; photon propagation; GPU; neutrino telescopes; simulation framework