McXtrace
1st project meeting, 22/9-09, KU-NBI
Minutes, KL, draft 1/10-09
Present:
Søren Kynde (SK), Jana Baltser (JB), Andrea Prodi (AP), Peter K. Willendrup (PKW), Erik
Knudsen (EK), Søren Schmidt (SS), Kell Mortensen (KM), Martin Meedom Nielsen (MMN),
Robert Feidenhans'l (RF) (only first part of meeting), Kell Mortensen (KM) (only last part of
meeting), Kim Lefmann (KL).
Excused:
Henning Friis Poulsen, Lise Arleth, Karsten Dan Joensen, Claudio Ferrero
Administrative (KL):
 This is the first meeting after the employment of the three new project staff. We have
therefore moved from the project preparation phase to the real project phase.
 The Molecular Movies Centre was unexpectedly not re-funded. MMN has requested to be
released from his promise about co-funding to McXtrace. KL will look into the budget.
Presentations of new staff (KL):
We have now filled 5 of the 6 positions in the project budget. The two first were EK and SS. At the
meeting we welcomed the three newcomers:
 Søren Kynde, Ph.D. Student at KU-Life. Søren did his M.Sc. project in Copenhagen with
RF in X-ray tomography, and will now work with simulations and experiments on SAXS
biophysics.
 Jana Baltser, Ph.D. Student at KU-NBI. Jana did her M.Sc. project in Sct. Petersburg on
optical instrumentation, and she will now work with simulation of X-ray optical
components, including experimental confirmations in collaboration with JJ-Xray Systems.
 Andrea Prodi, post doc at KU-NBI. Andrea did his PhD is correlated electron systems from
Parma 2005 and has since worked with X-ray experiments in the strong correlated electrons
grup by Y.S. Lee at MIT. Like Jana, he will work with the simulation of X-ray optical
components.
Still one Ph.D. Position at KU-Life should be filled.
Internal release of McXtrace, ver. 0.1 (EK):
We have met our first milestone with the release of the development version of McXtrace. The code
is separated from the McStas code base, but still have overlapping functionalities. The two codes
are thus developed concurrently, giving maximum synergy.
The physical properties which the rays/photons in McXtrace carry are (position x 3, k-vector x 3,
polarization x 3, Mcweight x 1, phase x 1).
McXtrace 0.1 is in reality a release of the system core only, running on Mac and Linux. Very few
components exist, all simple models for illustration and test purposes:
 Source (simple Gaussian)
 Arm (the empty component, defines a coordinate system)
 Slit (without edge scattering)
 Beam monitors (PSD, lambda-sensitive, or divergence-sensitive)
AP mentioned that we should have a way of interacting with sample scattering. This was agreed by
the other partners, who have interest in this (SS, SK).
AP suggested a non-random source for drawing diagrams for geometrical optics. EK will look into
that.
RF and MMN suggested that time is explicitly entered into the simulations. This was agreed upon.
EK will do that.
Collaborations
MAXLAB
Yngve Cerenius has expressed interest in the simulation of a SAXS beamline for MAX-4. There
could be many other possibilities for using McXtrace in collaboration with the MAXLAB staff. It is
still too early to formalize this.
DESY
Ivan Vartanians is working on simulations of partially coherent beams. He could be a potential
partner in the future, and we should arrange a meeting with him.
ESRF
The agreement with ESRF is about to be signed. Overall, it is agreed that AP will work at ESRF for
12 months, staying in portions of a few months or longer. In addition, we will collaborate to
develop McXtrace on the basis of SHADOW/XOP, so that the two systems will effectively
converge.
We still need to agree on the details about the code collaboration with Claudio Ferrero and Manuel
Sanchez del Rio. Some steps along this way could be to:

Create a link between McXtrace and the XOP databases.

Move the SHADOW functionality into McXtrace, component by component.

Create a link between the SHADOW/VUI user interface and the McXtrace system.

Make a concurrent test of McXtrace and SHADOW to ensure that results are identical. One
example could be an ID-09 simulation
In the coming few months it still makes sense to develop very simple McXtrace code pieces for
optical elements in order for us to gain understanding of the McXtrace core and X-ray optics in
general. In addition, this will enable us to debug advanced imported SHADOW/XOP functionality
stepwise.
Priorities in McXtrace developments
The McXtrace kernel seems in a good shape. EK takes care of the maintenance:

Addition of time

Porting to Windows platform
In the present phase, i.e. Before the input from SHADOW, we will create the following simple
components:

Laboratory source (JB and AP)

Synchrotron sources (EK)

Refractive lens (JB and AP)

Ideal crystal monochromator (JB and AP)

Curved ideal mirror (JB and AP)

Slit with edge scattering and Fresnel diffraction (JB and AP; later)

Real detectors, e.g. Pilatus (EK)
In addition, we will create sample components:

SAXS sample (SK)

Powder sample, reused from McStas (EK)
We will test this with a few simulations:

Als-Nielsen poor-mans instrument (JB)

JJ-Xray Systems SAXS set-up (to be defined)
Long-term plans:

Simulate ID-09, ID-11, MAX-IV SAXS

Simulate mechanical instibilities

Simulate coherence
Presentations: (slides from earlier meeting to be found at www.mcxtrace.org)
 No slide presentations this time
Next Meetings (accumulated):
1. SRI09 28/9-2/10. Participants: PKW, EK, KL
2. MAXLAB users meeting, early November: EK ++
3. Next McXtrace project meeting, november
4. XFEL instrumentation meeting, 9-12/12, Budapest. Participants: AP, JB
5. Meeting with ESRF, to be scheduled
Administrative ToDo (accumulated):
 (KL) Arrange a meeting with ESRF staff
 (KL) Consider financial contribution from Molecular Movies Centre
 (KM and LA) Announce the last Ph.D. Position in the project
 (EK) Arrange a meeting with Vartanians/DESY
 (KL) Discuss with Research Council (SFR) the collaboration with the UNIQ centre.
 (KL) Call next McXtrace meeting via Doodle.com
 (EK) Investigate how we can make conference calls work(!)