MASH, a Framework for the Automation of X-ray Optical Simulations

MASH stands for "Macros for the Automation of SHadow". It allows to run a set of ray-tracing simulations, for a range of photon energies for example, fully automatically. Undulator gaps, crystal angles etc. are tuned automatically. Important output parameters, such as photon flux, photon irradiance, focal spot size, bandwidth, etc. are then directly provided as function of photon energy. A photon energy scan is probably the most commonly requested one, but any parameter or set of parameters can be scanned through as well. Heat load calculations with finite element analysis providing temperatures, stress and deformations (Comsol) are fully integrated. The deformations can be fed back into the ray-tracing process simply by activating a switch. MASH tries to hide program internals such as file names, calls to pre-processors etc., so that the user (nearly) only needs to provide the optical setup. It comes with a web interface, which allows to run it remotely on a central computation server. Hence, no local installation or licenses are required, just a web browser and access to the local network. Numerous tools are provided to look at the ray-tracing results in the web-browser. The results can be also downloaded for local analysis. All files are human readable text files, that can be easily imported into third-party programs for further processing. All set parameters are stored in a single human-readable file in XML format.