Speaker
Description
FLUKA users are already benefiting from a steady stream of physics and technical improvements delivered through the current production code. After native support for unstructured meshes made available in v4-5, the upcoming major release v4-6 improves isomer production, enables direct use of PENDF neutron databases, introduces X-ray reflection at boundaries, and provides a refined fission model. Point-wise neutronics has been substantially enhanced, with better treatment of unresolved-resonance cross sections, Doppler broadening corrections, exotic reaction channels, and ab-initio thermal-scattering law handling for crystalline and molecular materials. Each release is subject to an elaborate, multi-layered validation campaign — combining continuous integration testing, dedicated feature test suites, and the FLUKAVAL framework of reference test cases with automated execution and analysis — ensuring that new physics and technical developments are thoroughly vetted before reaching users. These advances translate directly into more accurate and reliable simulations for radiation protection, accelerator design, medical physics, and space applications, without requiring users to change their existing workflows.
Looking ahead, the 5th generation of FLUKA is undergoing its most significant evolution to date: a full re-architecture built on top of the Geant4 toolkit and a modern geometry engine, designed to combine FLUKA's physics performance with the flexibility, extensibility, and interoperability of a widely adopted simulation framework. This next generation will bring seamless mixed-geometry modeling, improved medical imaging workflows, and refined treatments of ionization and multiple scattering. A modernized nuclear database will improve the accuracy and consistency of decay, transition, and level data across simulations.
Complementing this transition, new AI-assisted tools are emerging to support users and developers alike — from automated input creation and code documentation to intelligent assistance embedded directly in the Flair graphical interface — easing the path for the community as it will migrate to FLUKA v5.
Flair continues to serve as the shared GUI and geometry backbone across this evolution, now supporting FLUKA v4 & v5, PHITS, MCNP, and (partially) OpenMC, with on-the-fly cross-code input conversion as well as expanded lattice and torus support. A newly refined geometry engine delivers a ten-fold performance increase for geometries using parentheses, bringing their tracking speed on par with manually optimized, expanded geometries. Since FLUKA v5 builds directly on the flair geometry kernel, it inherits these performance gains immediately, showcasing how improvements to the shared infrastructure benefit both generations of the code at once.
| Topics | T2. Code status, development and model converters |
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