Patch Release 1.2.1

Thursday, August 02, 2018

We are happy to announce a new patch release for the 1.2 series, Allpix Squared version 1.2.1. The release is available as

Source code from the repository
Binary tarballs for CERN CentOS7 and Scientific Linux CERN 6 from the website
As Docker image from the project’s Docker registry
As directly usable CVMFS installation for LXPLUS machines or any other CERN machine.

The following changes have been incorporated:

Module: GeometryConstructionGeant4: The world material “vacuum” now really is vacuum, using the mean universe density provided by CLHEP. Before, the density was wrongly set to that of air. Added a simple overlap check that prints an ERROR-level message if an overlap between detector volumes is detected - the simulation is started anyway.
Module: ElectricFieldReader: Several improvements, comprising the use of an internal cache for field data, i.e. if the same field is used by several detectors it is only parsed once, proper check for the TCAD field thickness against the configured depletion depth instead of the sensor thickness (was only a wrong warning message), add a progress indicator when reading and parsing field data (on INFO verbosity level)
Module: GenericPropagation: A new plotting option has been added, allowing to only include charge carriers in the line plots which have actually reached the implants surface of the detector. This simplifies figuring out from where collected charge carriers originate in the sensor bulk. The drift time histogram has been removed as it produced very misleading results when used on sensors without full depletion (and thus charge collection).
Module: ProjectionPropagation: Store the drift time in the PropagatedCharge objects - we don’t expect this to be very accurate due to the approximations performed for the transport, but the estimate is better than shipping the deposition time as done up till now.
Module: SimpleTransfer: Add drift time histogram of charge carriers collected at the implants. This is the replacement debug plot for the histogram removed in GenericPropagation.
Mesh Converter: Improvements to logging, minor speed-ups by limiting logging calls. Major speed improvements to be expected in the next feature release by a multi-threaded approach.
Manual: Several minor improvements and typo corrections, added example configurations to the FAQ section. Updated Geant4 links since their documentation website URL has changed (in a breaking way).
Core: Configuration: The function setArray now works as expected and produces valid value arrays