Optical photon propagation is an embarrassingly parallel operation, well suited to acceleration on GPU devices. Rendering of images employs similar techniques -- for this reason, a pipeline to offload optical photon propagation from Geant4 to the industry-standard open-source renderer Mitsuba3 has been devised. With the creation of a dedicated plugin for single point multi-source emission, we find a photon propagation rate of 2×105 photons per second per CPU thread using LLVM and 1.2×106 photons per second per GPU using CUDA. This represents a speed-up of 70 on CPU and 400 on GPU over Geant4 and is competitive with other similar applications. The potential for further applications is discussed.
@article{arxiv.2309.12496,
title = {Optical Photon Simulation with Mitsuba3},
author = {Adam C. S. Davis and Sacha Barré and Yangyang Cui and Keith L Evans and Marco Gersabeck and Antonin Rat and Zahra Montazeri},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.12496},
year = {2023}
}