McStas and Mantid integration

McStas and Mantid are two well established software frameworks within the neutron scattering community. McStas has been primarily used for simulating the neutron transport of instruments, while Mantid has been primarily used for data reduction. We report here the status of our work done on the interoperability between the instrument simulation software McStas and the data reduction software Mantid. This provides a demonstration of how to successfully link together two software that otherwise have been developed independently, and in particular here show how this has been achieved for an instrument simulation software and a data reduction software. This paper will also provide examples of some of the expected future enhanced analysis that can be achieved from combining accurate instrument and sample simulations with software for correcting raw data. In the case of this work for raw data collected at large scale neutron facilities.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, POSTPRINT with proofs of article submitted to Journal of Neutron Researc

McStas (i): Introduction, use, and basic principles for ray-tracing simulations

We present an overview of, and an introduction to, the general-purpose neutron simulation package McStas. We present the basic principles behind Monte Carlo ray-tracing simulations of neutrons performed in the package and present a few simple examples. We present the implementation of McStas, the status of the package and its use in the neutron community. Finally, we briefly discuss the planned development of the package.Comment: 4 figure

Monte Carlo Particle Lists: MCPL

A binary format with lists of particle state information, for interchanging particles between various Monte Carlo simulation applications, is presented. Portable C code for file manipulation is made available to the scientific community, along with converters and plugins for several popular simulation packages

Simulation Tools for Detector and Instrument Design

The high performance requirements at the European Spallation Source have been driving the technological advances on the neutron detector front. Now more than ever is it important to optimize the design of detectors and instruments, to fully exploit the ESS source brilliance. Most of the simulation tools the neutron scattering community has at their disposal target the instrument optimization until the sample position, with little focus on detectors. The ESS Detector Group has extended the capabilities of existing detector simulation tools to bridge this gap. An extensive software framework has been developed, enabling efficient and collaborative developments of required simulations and analyses -- based on the use of the Geant4 Monte Carlo toolkit, but with extended physics capabilities where relevant (like for Bragg diffraction of thermal neutrons in crystals). Furthermore, the MCPL (Monte Carlo Particle Lists) particle data exchange file format, currently supported for the primary Monte Carlo tools of the community (McStas, Geant4 and MCNP), facilitates the integration of detector simulations with existing simulations of instruments using these software packages. These means offer a powerful set of tools to tailor the detector and instrument design to the instrument application