Speaker
Dr
Carsten Fortmann-Grote
(European XFEL GmbH, Schenefeld, Germany)
Description
Realistic simulations of experiments at large scale photon facilities, such as optical laser laboratories,
synchrotrons, and Free Electron Lasers, are of vital importance for the successful preparation,
execution, and analysis of these experiments investigating ever more complex physical systems, e.g.
biomolecules, complex materials, and ultrashort lived states of highly excited matter. Traditional
photon science modeling takes into account only isolated aspects of an experiment, such as the beam
propagation, the photon-matter interaction, or the scattering process, making idealized assumptions
about the remaining parts, e.g. the source spectrum, temporal structure and coherence properties of
the photon beam, or the detector response. In SIMEX, we have implemented a platform for complete
start-to-end simulations, following the radiation from the source, through the beam transport optics
to the sample or target under investigation, its interaction with and scattering from the sample
and its registration in a photon detector, including a realistic model of the detector response to
the radiation. Data analysis tools can be hooked up to the modeling pipeline easily. This allows
researchers and facility operators to simulate their experiments and instruments in real life scenarios,
identify promising and unattainable regions of the parameter space and ultimately make better use
of expensive beamtime.
Our software consists of a generic backbone defining the user and data interfaces to Calculators
which are responsible for the simulation of the segments in the virtual beamline. A number of
specific Calculators for the photon source, photon propagation, photon-matter interaction, photon
scattering, photon detection, and photon data analysis are pre-installed. Further contributed Calculators can easily be integrated by inheriting from the abstract interfaces and providing only a few,
well defined interface methods. A common data format description facilitates the data exchange
among simulation codes.
In this paper, we describe the general structure and implementation of the SIMEX software and
discuss a number of applications: Modeling of single particle imaging at the European X-Ray Free
Electron Laser (XFEL), a pump-and probe experiment with ultrashort pulsed optical laser excitation
of a metal foil and subsequent probing by small angle scattering with coherent XFEL radiation, and
a long pulse optical laser shock compression experiment probed by synchrotron radiation.
Primary author
Dr
Carsten Fortmann-Grote
(European XFEL GmbH, Schenefeld, Germany)
Co-authors
Dr
Adrian P. Mancuso
(European XFEL GmbH, Schenefeld, Germany)
Mr
Alexander Grund
(Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Germany)
Dr
Alexey Buzmakov
(Institute of Crystallography Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia)
Dr
Ashley Joy
(University College London, London, United Kingdom)
Mr
Axel Huebl
(Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Germany)
Prof.
Beata Ziaja
(Center for Free-Electron Laser Science, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, Hamburg, Germany)
Dr
Chun Hong Yoon
(Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Menlo Park, USA)
Prof.
Duane Loh
(National University of Singapore, Singapore)
Dr
Liubov Samoylova
(European XFEL GmbH, Schenefeld, Germany)
Mr
Marco Garten
(Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Germany)
Dr
Matthew Wing
(University College London, London, United Kingdom)
Dr
Michael Bussmann
(Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Germany)
Dr
Richard Briggs
(European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Grenoble, France)
Prof.
Robin Santra
(Center for Free-Electron Laser Science, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, Hamburg, Germany)
Sergey Yakubov
(DESY)
Dr
Steffen Hauf
(European XFEL GmbH, Schenefeld, Germany)
Mr
Tonn Rueter
(European XFEL GmbH, Schenefeld, Germany)
Dr
Zoltan Jurek
(Center for Free-Electron Laser Science, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, Hamburg, Germany)
