here’s how it goes:
- CORSIKA — COsmic Ray SImulations for KAscade
— is a ubiquitous Monte-Carlo tool for simulating Extensive Air Showers from
cosmic rays in the atmosphere.
- COAST — COrsika dAta accesS Tools — is a C++ program/library to read CORSIKA’s
binary data format. the data can be many gigabytes in size, but conceptually it’s
a simple packet series. so the reader is essentially an iterator over simulated
particles.
- finally, pyCOAST is a python interface for COAST, for those who wants to read out
the particles without writing a dedicated C++ program.
at the core, this is just a simple SWIG-generated interface with some
quality-of-life wrapper classes on the python side. (after using SWIG once i don’t want to
ever touch python C API with my hands, at least for trivial interfacing tasks!)
the usage examples for this library are in
carpet-scripts
dir, which, as the name suggests, were used for Monte-Carlo data analysis in
Carpet-2 experiment (see e.g. this article).