Grazing-Incidence Optics Simulation Tool

Introduction

Wolter-I-figured glancing incidence X-ray telescopes have been used implemented in technology for medical physics, synchrotron accelerators, nuclear physics, astrophysics, and space physics. The Wolter-I geometry consists of a combination of two grazing mirror segments, a paraboloid primary followed by a hyperboloid secondary. In these telescopes, a focused image is formed when X-rays are reflected on both mirrors. A limitation of these optics is the problem with stray light, also known as a ghost rays which are unreflected, or singly reflected X-rays that can reach the focal plane. These form ghost images which are highly depended on the X-rays incident angle and energy of the x-rays.

This software package provides a tool to analyze and simulate the response of difference wolter-1 (or conical approximations to Wolter-1) optics to incidence x-rays to characterize ghost rays.

How to Install

To do complete install:

sudo python setup.py install

To install in current directory:

python setup.py install --home=.

or using pip while immediately outside the directory

pip install -e foxsi-optics-sim

When installing to local directory, you need to update PATH and PYTHONPATH variables in order to use the foxsisim tools:

For linux, to the following, first open ~/.bashrc in a text editor and add the following two lines where FOXSISIM_DIR is the location of your foxsisim root directory:

export PATH=$PATH:"FOXSISIM_DIR/bin"
export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:"FOXSISIM_DIR/lib/python"

Examples and Gallery

See the example folder for simple scripts on how to run setup and run various simulation scenerios.

See the gallery folder for a gallery of different investigations of ghost rays.

Help

For help using the foxsisim module use python's help() command. For example:

import foxsisim
help(foxsisim)
from foxsisim.module import Module
help(Module)

Also, see the foxsisim/examples/ folder.

To run the GUI from the command line, type:

foxsisim-gui.py

For help using foxsisim-gui, see the Quickstart guide located in the foxsisim/doc/ folder.

Authors

This code was originally developed at NASA GSFC under the summer internship program by Robert Taylor (@rtaylor) and Steven Christe (@ehsteve).

J.C. Buitrago-Casas (@pymilo), of UCB Space Sciences laboratory has also significantly contributed to this codebase.