DETECT2000: An Improved Monte-Carlo Simulator for the Computer Aided Design of Photon Sensing Devices

We introduce a new version of DETECT. DETECT is a Monte-Carlo simulator developed for the Computer Aided Design (CAD) of optical photon sensing devices. The simulator generates individual emission photons in specified locations of a photon-emitting device and tracks their passage and interactions in active and passive components of the system. Extensive options are available in the simulator to model the geometry of the photon sensing device, to account for the time and wavelength distribution of emission photons, to track their interactions with surfaces, to account for their possible absorption and re-emission by a wave-shifting components and to model their detection by pixelated photomultipliers or photodiodes. DETECT2000 is a very significant upgrade of DETECT97, which has long been established in the nuclear medicine instrumentation community for its accuracy to model the performances of high resolution energy and position sensitive gamma-ray detectors. The 2000 version of DETECT offers an accelerated version of the simulator which has been redesigned in the object-oriented C++ language. New features such as the tracking of the time and wavelength history of individual optical photons have been added.