NSLS-II Seminar

The challenging ESRF Upgrade Programme foresees the reconstruction of about one third of the beamlines. The new beamlines will be very long (more than 100 m) to use routinely micro- and nano-beams. This requires a very high demagnification of the ESRF source, which makes beamline optics design a fundamental concept for the future availability of bright and small beam. At present, during the concept phase, an intense use of computer tools for x-ray optics is necessary, in particular ray-tracing, which has demonstrated to be the most reliable tool for designing and optimizing synchrotron beamlines.


A substantial effort has already been invested at the ESRF in developing optics tools and facilitating their use. I will summarize our existing tools, based on XOP and SHADOW. Some examples of recent simulations will be presented, including all kind of synchrotron optics (reflective, refractive and diffractive). An important issue is to understand what are the conditions required (figure shape and figure errors) for the maximum allowed demagnification, and what are the limits. In parallel, an ambitious project for the upgrade of the existing software and development of new tools has been planned.