Generative Surrogates for Fast Simulation: TPC Case

Abstract: Simulation of High Energy Physics experiments is widely used, necessary for both detector and physics studies. Detailed Monte-Carlo simulation algorithms are often limited due to the computational complexity of such methods, and therefore faster approaches are desired. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are well suited for aggregating a number of detailed simulation steps into a surrogate probability density estimator readily available for fast sampling. In this work, we demonstrate the power of the GAN-based fast simulation model on the use case of simulating the response for the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) in the MPD experiment at the NICA accelerator complex. We show that our model can generate high-fidelity TPC responses, while accelerating the TPC simulation by at least an order of magnitude. We describe alternative representation approaches for this problem and also outline the roadmap for the deployment of our method into the software stack of the experiment.