Prometheus: An open-source neutrino telescope simulation
Description
Neutrino telescopes are gigaton-scale neutrino detectors comprised of individual light-detection units. Though constructed from simple building blocks, they have opened a new window to the Universe and are able to probe center-of-mass energies that are comparable to those of collider experiments. Prometheus is a new, open-source simulation tailored for this kind of detector. Our package, which is written in a combination of C++ and Python provides a balance of ease of use and performance and allows the user to simulate a neutrino telescope with arbitrary geometry deployed in ice or water. Prometheus simulates the neutrino interactions in the volume surrounding the detector, computes the light yield of the hadronic shower and the out-going lepton, propagates the photons in the medium, and records their arrival times and position in user-defined regions. Finally, Prometheus events are serialized into a parquet file, which is a compact and interoperational file format that allows prompt access to the events for further analysis.