Attosecond Ray Tracing

The AttosecondRayTracing code is a tool for the attosecond-physics community to assist with the design of beam transport and refocusing setups.

It is written by Stefan Haessler, André Kalouguine, and Anthony Guillaume of Laboratoire d’Optique Appliquée (LOA), CNRS, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France and Charles Bourassin-Bouchet Laboratoire Charles Fabry (LCF)), Institut d’Optique, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, France.

It does ray tracing calculations for (a succession of) reflective optics, freely arrangeable including grazing incidence configurations. It keeps track of the optical paths of each ray and therefore supplies precise information about the delays with which the rays hit a virtual detector plane. These can –within the limits of geometric optics– describe spatio-temporal distortions introduced by aberrations of the optical setup.

Such calculations were already published by Charles ten years ago for single-mirror setups, demonstrating how sensitive attosecond pulses are to spatio-temporal distortions and how easily such distortions are picked up in the reflective grazing-incidence optical setups required to transport and refocus them [C. Bourassin-Bouchet et al. “How to focus an attosecond pulse”. Opt. Express 21, 2506 (2013); C. Bourassin-Bouchet et al. “Spatiotemporal distortions of attosecond pulses”. JOSA A 27, 1395 (2010)].

A publication of simulations of the beam transport and focusing of high-numerical-aperture XUV attosecond pulses with multi-mirror setups is in preparation and will become the reference that we ask you to cite if you have used this code in your work.

Please start by reading the Installation and Usage pages.