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 and the user interface, which is derived from ROOT.

Ionisation

The Heed program generates ionisation patterns of fast charged particles. The core of Heed is a photo-absorption and ionisation model. Heed in addition provides atomic relaxation processes and dissipation of high-energy electrons.

Electric fields

Garfield++ currently offers the following techniques for calculating electric fields:

solutions in the thin-wire limit for devices made of wires and planes; interfaces with the finite element programs Ansys, Elmer, and CST, which can compute approximate fields in nearly arbitrary 3-dimensional configurations with dielectrics and conductors; an interface with the Synopsys Sentaurus device simulation program. In the future, the program should become interfaced with neBEM, as is already the case for Garfield.

Transport of electrons

Magboltz is used to compute electron transport and avalanches in nearly arbitrary gas mixtures.

Garfield++ includes contributions from

Kim Baraka, Joshua Renner, Heinrich Schindler, Nicholi Shiell, Rob Veenhof, Klaus Zenker. Magboltz is developed by Steve Biagi.

Heed was written by Igor Smirnov.