Parallel simulations of partially coherent wavefront propagation from a finite emittance electron beam

Abstract

Hard X-ray undulator radiation at 3rd generation storage rings falls between the geometrical and the fully coherent limit. This is a result of the small but finite emittance of the electron beam source and means that the radiation cannot be completely modelled by incoherent ray tracing or by fully coherent wave propagation. We have developed using the wavefront propagation code Synchrotron Radiation Workshop (SRW) running in a Python environment, a parallel computer program using the Monte Carlo method for modelling the partially coherent emission from electron beam sources taking into account the finite emittance of the source. Using a parallel computing cluster with in excess of 500 cores and each core calculating the wavefront from in excess of a 1000 electrons, a source containing millions of electrons could be simulated. We have applied this method to the Diamond X-ray Imaging and Coherence beamline (113).