ART - Attosecond Ray Tracing - is a free python code 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 with a specific focus on ultrashort (femto- and attosecond) laser pulses. Therefore the code currently focuses on reflective optics, freely arrangeable including grazing incidence configurations.
Ten years ago, Charles made geometric optics calculations that demonstrated 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)]. ART now makes these calculations avaible to the ultrafast optics community in a free and (hopefully) easily accessible python code.
A publication of simulations of the beam transport and focusing of high-numerical-aperture XUV attosecond pulses is in preparation and will become the reference that we ask you to cite if you have used this code in your work.
The detailed documentaion can be found here.
A quickstart documentation will very soon (promised ;-) be added in the following.
The code requires Python 3.9 or newer and depends on the libraries NumPy, Numpy-Quaternion, matplotlib, and for 3D-rendering of optical configurations and rays, PyVista.
If installing using pip, we recommend installing the dependencies in a virtual environment, for instance using
python -m venv <new_virtual_environment_folder>This lets you install and use the software without interfering with the system installation of Python.
As for the installation of the dependencies:
pip install numpy numpy-quaternion matplotlib pyvista scipy colorcetJust as with pip, we recommend using a separate virtual environment to install and use ART. The dependencies are all available in the conda-forge repository.
You can just download the code as a zip file from here. Or if you are using the git version control software, ou can clone the repository like so:
git clone https://github.com/LOA-PCO/AttosecondRayTracing.git You are welcome to fork the code and contribute to its further development.
To run ART, you run a configuration script, written itself in python. The user is responsible for ensuring that it doesn’t contain any harmful code. Examples and a template for such a configuration scipts are provided in examples\CONFIG_x.py. Running, exploring and adapting these examples should get any user up and running fairly quickly.
The configuration scripts can be run directly in an IDE like Spyder with an IPython-console, but also directly from the command line.