A Geant4 Based Engineering Tool for Fresnel Lenses

Geant4 is a Monte Carlo radiation transport toolkit that is becoming a tool of generalized application in areas such as high-energy physics, nuclear physics, astroparticle physics, or medical physics. Besides the electromagnetic and hadronic physics processes, Geant4 provides also an optical physics process category, allowing the simulation of the production and propagation of light. Such capabilities are well tailored for the simulation of optics systems namely in cosmic-rays experiments based in the detection of Cherenkov and fluorescence light. The use of Geant4 as an engineering tool for the optics design and simulation of Fresnel lens systems is discussed through a specific example. It is thus possible to implement a realistic end-to-end simulation of a physics experiment using Fresnel lenses in the framework of Geant4.