A very powerful approach to predict the performance of an optical system in general, and a synchrotron radiation beamline in particular is the use of ray tracing methods.

For synchrotron radiation applications, the code SHADOW has been used extensively for designing and optimizing syncrhotron radiation beamlines during the last 20 years. It can be downloaded in binary form the ESRF aftp site or the source from http://forge.epn-campus.eu/projects/shadow3 (via "git clone git://git.epn-campus.eu/repositories/shadow3") 

SHADOWVUI, the Visual User Interface of SHADOW is integrated as an extension of our XOP package, and it is distributed within it.

Some characteristics of SHADOWVUI:

  • It is made on top of 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 included in the shadowvui distribution.
  • SHADOWVUI calls the standard SHADOW kernel. The interface provide high level menus and graphics to prepare the SHADOW inputs, to run SHADOW and to process the resulting files, including visualization and beamline 3D representation.
  • It includes BLViewer, an interactive tool for visualizing in 3D your optical system.
  • It comes as an optional part (i.e., extension) of the XOP package. See it for downloading and installation instructions.
  • Tutorials on XOP and SHADOW

 

 

Some of our ray tracing activity with ray tracing:

 

For citing SHADOW and SHADOWVUI, use: 

  • F. Cerrina and M. Sanchez del Rio "Ray Tracing of X-Ray Optical Systems"  Ch. 35 in Handbook of Optics (volume  V, 3rd edition),  edited by M. Bass, Mc Graw Hill, New York, 2009.  ISBN: 0071633138 / 9780071633130         
  •   M. Sanchez del Rio, N. Canestrari, F. Jiang and F. Cerrina "SHADOW3: a new version of the synchrotron X-ray optics modelling package"  J. Synchrotron Rad. (2011). 18, 708-716 Open access link here.