Beam Stability: Raytracing Requirements and Implementations

Stability to-the-user fundamentally starts with present needs and future goals from the user community conveyed to facility staff in terms of user observables into the sample chamber. These are then projected onto the requirements for both the beamlines and the sources. In turn, specifications unfold for performance of subsystems, individual components, and facility services. Altogether, this process involves users, and facility staff from beamlines, operations, engineering, controls, and machine physics.This paper focuses on the transformation of user-to-source requirements, which is a small, but critical, part of the general subject. This translation has been expedited by semi-automated use, via scripting, of the SHADOW raytracing software. The dependence of each user observable on each source parameter is functionally determined, and inverted, for variable values of the user observables. In this way, source stability requirements can be readily determined for the needs of a given experiment on a given beamline in a particular mode. A description of the algorithms, with a working example on a new, slitless undulator beamline at SRC are presented.