McXtrace - An X-ray ray-trace simulation package

9  Special-purpose components

The chapter deals with components that are not easily included in any of the other chapters because of their special nature, but which are still part of the McXtrace system.

One part of these components deals with splitting simulations into two (or more) stages. For example, the front end of a beamline is often not changed much, and a long simulation of photon rays “surviving” through initial optics could be reused for several simulations of the beamline back-end, speeding up the simulations by (typically) one or two orders of magnitude. The components for doing this trick is Virtual_input and Virtual_output, which stores and reads photon rays, respectively.

For integration with SHADOW [Rio+11] the components Shadow_inpt and Shadow_output have been written.

Progress_bar is a simulation utility that displays the simulation status, but assumes the form of a component.