Loop Overview

This is the GENETIS Ara Loop which is used to evolve VPOL and HPOL antennas to become more sensitive to neutrinos in AraSim. This a generational genetic algorithm, meaning that we create individuals in a generation all at the same time. This means it's easy to split the process into 4 parts that repeat each generation until stopped. Let's go through a broad strokes approach to learn what the algorithm is doing each generation and how things evolve.

Loop Parts

When running the loop, this is the order and process every generation goes through.

GA

This is the start of each generation, which creates the genes for every individual in the population. These individuals are created through different operators, which are covered more in depth in the GA section, which allow for evolution to actually take place.

XFdtd

After individuals are created, we need to have information on how they perform as an antenna. We do this through XFdtd simulations that return uan files which contain gain and phase information at each of our desired frequencies.

AraSim

Now that we have the performance of the antennas, we are able to see how they would perform at detecting neutrinos in-ice through AraSim. This allows us to throw a number of neutrinos to see how sensitive each individual is through the veff metric, which is our fitness score.

Analysis

After getting the fitness of the current generation we can go through to plot and analyze the generation to allow us to get a good overview of the evolution.