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arXiv · 2608.27306

Accelerating Optical Photon Simulation in DUNE with Opticks

Ilker Parmaksiz·Aaron Higuera·Laura Paulucci·Viktor Pec·Estanislao Forino
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Abstract

Optical photon simulation is among the most computationally demanding tasks in complex and large detector geometries. In the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), the scale of the far-detector modules makes photon-by-photon transport with \texttt{GEANT4} prohibitively expensive on CPUs. We present the first implementation and performance evaluation of GPU-accelerated optical photon simulation at the 10~kt scale, based on \texttt{Opticks} and applied to the DUNE far-detector horizontal-drift (FD-HD) geometry. On the full FD-HD geometry, \texttt{Opticks} propagates the same photons as \texttt{GEANT4} with a speedup of $313 \pm 3$ over single-threaded and $83 \pm 1$ over four-thread \texttt{GEANT4}, and is validated against the reference \texttt{GEANT4} simulation across all metrics considered. We further integrate \texttt{Opticks} into the \texttt{LArSoft}-based DUNE software stack. Photons simulated on the GPU with \texttt{GEANT4}-equivalent physics retain full Monte Carlo fidelity at a computational cost that makes high-statistics optical studies and the generation of labeled datasets for machine learning feasible at the kiloton scale.

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Ilker Parmaksiz, Aaron Higuera, Laura Paulucci, Viktor Pec, Estanislao Forino. 2026-08-27. Accelerating Optical Photon Simulation in DUNE with Opticks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27306

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