CaloClouds: fast geometry-independent highly-granular calorimeter simulation

Abstract Simulating showers of particles in highly-granular detectors is a key frontier in the application of machine learning to particle physics. Achieving high accuracy and speed with generative machine learning models would enable them to augment traditional simulations and alleviate a major computing constraint. This work achieves a major breakthrough in this task by, for the first time, directly generating a point cloud of a few thousand space points with energy depositions in the detector in 3D space without relying on a fixed-grid structure. This is made possible by two key innovations: i) Using recent improvements in generative modeling we apply a diffusion model to generate photon showers as high-cardinality point clouds. ii) These point clouds of up to 6,000 space points are largely geometry-independent as they are down-sampled from initial even higher-resolution point clouds of up to 40,000 so-called Geant steps. We showcase the performance of this approach using the specific example of simulating photon showers in the planned electromagnetic calorimeter of the International Large Detector (ILD) and achieve overall good modeling of physically relevant distributions.