This document contains information on the neutron scattering components which are the building blocks for defining instruments in the Monte Carlo neutron ray-tracing program McStas version 3.8.6. The initial release in October 1998 of version 1.0 was presented in Ref. [LN99] and further developed though version 2.0 as presented in Ref. [Wil+14]. The reader of this document is not supposed to have specific knowledge of neutron scattering, but some basic understanding of physics is helpful in understanding the theoretical background for the component functionality. For details about setting up and running simulations, we refer to the McStas system manual [Wil+05]. We assume familiarity with the use of the C programming language.
It is a pleasure to thank Dir. Kurt N. Clausen, PSI, for his continuous support to McStas and for having initiated the project. Continuous support to McStas has also come from Prof. Robert McGreevy, ISIS. Apart from the authors of this manual, also Per-Olof Åstrand, NTNU Trondheim, has contributed to the development of the McStas system. We have further benefited from discussions with many other people in the neutron scattering community, too numerous to mention here.
The users who contributed components to this manual are acknowledged as authors of the individual components. We encourage other users to contribute components with manual entries for inclusion in future versions of McStas.
In case of errors, questions, or suggestions, do not hesitate to contact the authors at mcstas@risoe.dk or consult the McStas home page [Mcs]. A special bug/request reporting service is available [Git].
We would like to kindly thank all McStas component contributors. This is the way we improve the software alltogether.
The McStas project has been supported by the European Union through“XENNI / Cool Neutrons” (FP4), “SCANS” (FP5), “nmi3/MCNSI” (FP6), “‘nmi3-ii/E-learning” and “nmi3-ii/MCNSI7” (FP7) [Nmi; Mcn]. McStas was supported directly from the construction project for the ISIS second target station (TS2/EU), see [Ts2]. Currently McStas is supported through the Danish involvement in the Data Management and Software Center, a subdivision of the European Spallation Source (ESS), see [Ess] and the European Union through “SINE2020/WP3 e-elarning” and and “SINE2020/WP8 e-Tools” (Horizon2020). the home pages [Sin].
If you appreciate this software, please subscribe to the neutron-mc@risoe.dk email list, send us a smiley message, and contribute to the package. We also encourage you to refer to this software when publishing results, with the following citations:
P. Willendrup, E. Farhi, E. Knudsen, U. Filges and K. Lefmann, Journal of Neutron Research, 17 (2014) 35.
K. Lefmann and K. Nielsen, Neutron News 10/3, 20, (1999).
P. Willendrup, E. Farhi and K. Lefmann, Physica B, 350 (2004) 735.