CORSIKA 8 Framework for Particle Cascades in Astroparticle Physics

The purpose of CORSIKA is to simulate any particle cascades in astroparticle physics or astrophysical context. A lot of emphasis is put on modularity, flexibility, completeness, validation and correctness. To boost computational efficiency different techniques are provided, like thinning or cascade equations. The aim is that CORSIKA remains the most comprehensive framework for simulating particle cascades with stochastic and continuous processes.

The software makes extensive use of static design patterns and compiler optimization. Thus, the most fundamental configuration decision of the user must be performed at compile time. At run time only specific model parameters can still be changed.

CORSIKA 8 is by default released under the GPLv3 license. See license file which is part of every release and the source code.

If you use, or want to refer to, CORSIKA 8 please cite "Towards a Next Generation of CORSIKA: A Framework for the Simulation of Particle Cascades in Astroparticle Physics", Comput.Softw.Big Sci. 3 (2019) 2. We kindly ask (and require) any relevant improvement or addition to be offered or contributed to the main CORSIKA 8 repository for the benefit of the whole community.

When you plan to contribute to CORSIKA 8 check the guidelines outlined here: coding guidelines. Code that fails the review by the CORSIKA author group must be improved before it can be merged in the official code base. After your code has been accepted and merged you become a contributor of the CORSIKA 8 project (code author).

IMPORTANT: Before you contribute, you need to read and agree to the collaboration agreement. The agreement can be discussed, and eventually improved.

We also want to point you to the MCnet guidelines, which are very useful also for us.

Get in contact

• Connect to https://gitlab.ikp.kit.edu register yourself and join the "Air Shower Physics" group
• Connect to corsika-devel@lists.kit.edu (self-register at https://www.lists.kit.edu/sympa/subscribe/corsika-devel) to get in touch with the project

Installation (from source)

Prerequisites

CORSIKA 8 is tested regularly via gitlab-CI using recent gcc and clang versions. Additional software prerequisites: cmake, g++, git. Furthermore, eigen3, boost, catch2, spdlog are shipped in the ThirdParty directory, so an installation on the system is optional. Also Pythia 8, CONEX and PROPOSAL are distributed in the ThirdParty folder. You may also install those packages on your system and use those; we test with Pythia version 8.235.

On a bare Ubuntu 18.04, just add:

sudo apt install binutils gfortran make python3 cmake gcc g++ git libz-dev libspdlog-dev libeigen3-dev libboost-iostreams-dev

Furthermore these packages are also reqommended: add gcc ssh-client less rsync libboost-dev

If you work with FreeBSD, run:

pkg install git cmake python3 flang eigen

or add boost-libs if you want to use the system versions.

Compiling

Follow these steps to download and install CORSIKA 8, master development version

git clone --recursive https://gitlab.ikp.kit.edu/AirShowerPhysics/corsika.git
cd corsika
mkdir ../corsika-build
cd ../corsika-build
cmake ../corsika -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=../corsika-install
make -j8
make install

Type make test to run the unit test suite.

Installation (using docker containers)

There are docker containers prepared that bring all the environment and packages you need to run CORSIKA. See docker hub for a complete overview.

Prerequisites

You only need docker, e.g. on Ubunut: sudo apt-get install docker and of course root access.

Compiling

Follow these steps to download and install CORSIKA 8, master development version

git clone --recursive https://gitlab.ikp.kit.edu/AirShowerPhysics/corsika.git
cd corsika
sudo docker run -v $PWD:/corsika -it corsika/devel:clang-8 /bin/bash
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=../install
make -j8
make install

Type make test to run the unit test suite.

Running, Examples

There are various examples in the folder Documentation/Examples.

If you want to see how the first simple hadron cascade develops, see Documentation/Examples/cascade_example.cc for a starting point.

Run the cascade_example with:

cd ../corsika-install
share/examples/cascade_example

Visualize output (needs gnuplot installed):

bash share/tools/plot_tracks.sh tracks.dat 
firefox tracks.dat.gif 

Or also consider the vertical_EAS example in the same directory, which can be configured with command line options.

Generating doxygen documentation

To generate the documentation, you need doxygen and graphviz. If you work with the docker corsika/devel containers this is already included. Otherwise, e.g. on Ubuntu 18.04, do:

sudo apt-get install doxygen graphviz

Switch to the corsika build directory and do

make doxygen
make install

browse with firefox:

firefox ../corsika-install/share/doc/html/index.html