Ray-tracing x-rays
The essential tool or engine for x-ray optics calculations is the ray-tracing program
SHADOW, developed at
Nanotech-Wisconsin
(University of Wisconsin).
SHADOW is a general purpose ray tracing code specially designed for
synchrotron radiation beamline optics.
You may want to vistit the SHADOW
WWW Home Page at NanoTech, where you can
find instructions for download the code and information about the SHADOW's mailing list.
SHADOW documentation:
- SHADOW primer
(PDF file,
HTML).
- SHADOW User's guide: Sources (not available in electronic format).
- SHADOW User's guide: Trace (does not yet exist).
- SHADOW User's guide: Utilities(PDF file)
We have been working at ESRF with SHADOW for many years in close collaboration
with NanoTech, and we have developed some extensions:
- A complete Visual User Interface for SHADOW (SHADOWVUI). It includes BLViewer, an interactive tool for designing in 3D your optical system.
- A library of IDL routines to perform SHADOW post-processing
(graphics, histograms, etc.). It is also suitable for performing SHADOW loops, etc.
This library is the core of SHADOWVUI.
The IDL source core is available by request.
- Asymmetric wiggler: how to simulate
a asymmetric wiggler with SHADOW.
- Waviness: A new method to treat the waviness
or slope errors of the optical surfaces.
Other interesting documents we prepared:
[Scientific Software|
ESRF]
Created: 19 Aug 1997. Last modified: 6 November 2002
M. Sanchez del Rio (srio@esrf.fr)