New trends in detector and background simulation: Geant4

The geant4 simulation tool-kit has been developed as a simulation tool-kit for particle physics, and an ever growing list of laboratories and institutes are using geant4 as baseline for their simulation needs concerning detector design and radiation shielding problems. In addition, there are a growing number of high energy physics experiments that use the technology provided by this program in the preparation of the detector and the interpretation of the data. We will give a brief history of detector simulation in high energy physics as it relates to Geant4, and summarize the activities in the field. We will also analyze the reasons for the current successes of the geant4 tool-kit with a penchant towards hadronic physics simulation.