Life on board ESS

A new release of McStas (v. 1.12a) was released on april 3rd 2009, freely downloadable from http://www.mcstas.org/download .

McStas is a world-known, open-source, collaborative software for simulation of neutron scattering instruments and experiments.

Since 1998 McStas has been hosted at Risø DTU (previously known as Risø) near Roskilde in Denmark, for many years in collaboration with ILL in Grenoble and now also in partnership with NBI, University of Copenhagen.

Since its birth, McStas has been used in major neutron instrumentation efforts, including

• FRM-II reactor in Munich, Germany
• OPAL at ANSTO near Sydney, Australia
• The ISIS second target station (TS2) project in Chilton, UK
• SNS at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA
• J-PARC in Tokai, Japan

- But also in big renewal programs like the ILL Millenium Program plus all kinds of other instrumentation projects at the PSI, LLB, HMI, FZJ, and other neutron sources.

Being an open-source (Gnu Public License) software, McStas allows its users do develop their own models in the framework of the package - and to contribute them back to the project. By this combined effort of the McStas team and the McStas users, we now have ~ 100 components in one, comprehensive package.

McStas includes models of neutron sources, beam optics, detectors and also sophisticated models of many of the samples typically studied at neutron scattering instruments. Having models of both neutrons, instrument and sample allows to perform Virtual Experiments, an area where McStas is indisputedly the strongest solution in the market.

Virtual experiments makes McStas very useful for teaching and training purposes, a neutron scattering course has been given at University of Copenhagen every year since 2005. The students learn about the theory of neutron scattering, build op their own virtual instruments and perform experiments - and finally take a trip to e.g. PSI in Switzerland to also scatter real world neutrons.

McStas was originally born in the Øresund region - but has become a common project and an essential tool for neutron scatterers on the entire globe.

If you feel like trying our software, we recommend our Ubuntu live-dvd  - to be run without installation - directly from your DVD drive!