About
The design of an innovative detector involves deciding on an architecture offering the best trade-off among many figures of merit, such as tracking resolution, power dissipation, bandwidth, cost and so on. Quantitatively evaluating these figures of merit as early as possible in the design phase is of capital importance and it is best done with the aid of software models.
tkLayout is a modeling and performance analysis tool developed at CMS for the study of a new silicon tracker replacing the current one in view of the Phase-2 upgrade (mid-2020's).
A tracker geometry is generated from simple configuration files, defining the module types, layout and materials. Support structures are automatically added and services routed to provide a realistic tracker description.
tkLayout is made with flexibility in mind: new performance estimates and support for different detector geometries can be quickly added, thanks to its modular structure. Besides, the software executes very quickly (about two minutes), so that many possible architectural variations can be rapidly modeled and compared, to help in the choice of a viable detector layout and then to optimize it. Moreover, despite being explicitly developed for CMS, supports for other trackers can be easily added.
The tracker geometries generated with tkLayout can be exported to the standard CMS simulation framework (CMSSW) for full Monte Carlo studies.
Developed at CERN by https://github.com/tkLayout/tkLayout/graphs/contributors.