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 fron the Nanotech site or from the ESRF mirror site

We have been working at ESRF with SHADOW for many years in close collaboration with NanoTech, and we have developed a powerful Visual User Interface for SHADOW, called SHADOWVUI. 

SHADOWVUI is integrated as an extesion 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 available by request.
• 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 optiona l 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:

• Waviness or slope errors: a method used for simulating these mirror errors before your mirror is available. This method is fully integrated in the SHADOWVUI environment.
  
• Roughness: A small document explainig the use of the mirror's roughness with SHADOW. An example workspace file (example_roughness.ws) is available in ShadowVUI. See also this paper by Sangeet Singh et al.
• Crystal optics: models for mosaic crystals, asymmetric crystals and crystals in transmission geometry.
  
• Some papers containing calculations for several ESRF beamlines:ID09, ID10, ID12, ID13