Theia is a package for creating Monte Carlo simulation of optionally polarized light propagation through volumes of arbitrary shapes containing (non-)scattering media while keeping track of the elapsed time. This includes physically correct reflections and transmission at their boundaries. The simulation runs on the GPU utilizing dedicated ray tracing hardware found on modern ones for increased performance.
This package allows through its modular design maximal flexibility in defining simulations. While this also includes the produced results, usually one wants to produce light curves describing the expected signal at the detector as function of time:
Theia is a python package and can installed using pip via a single line:
pip install git+https://github.com/tkerscher/theiaTheia currently runs on Linux and Windows, and requires a Vulkan compatible GPU. Virtually all common vendors such as AMD, Intel and NVidia met this requirement including the integrated graphics on CPUs.
For the full feature set a ray tracing capable GPU is required, which are:
- NVidia since GTX 1000 series (2016)
- AMD since RX6000 series (2020)
- Intel since Arc Alchemist (2022)
The integrated graphics on modern CPUs begin to support ray tracing, too:
- AMD since Ryzen 7000 series (2022)
- Intel since Core Ultra 100 Series (2023)
In case no suitable GPU is available, Mesa provides a software implementation emulating a GPU on the CPU called llvmpipe. This is however strongly discouraged as performance is expected to be much worse than even the slowest GPUs.
The documentation is contained in the docs directory. For example notebooks
on how to use this package see the notebooks directory.