sPHENIX EMCal discussion

[John Haggerty <haggerty AT bnl.gov>]

With help from Eric Mannel and Ed Desmond, we've set up a machine and 
software for optical design work.  This should be useful as we refine 
the optical design of the EMCAL and HCAL, and we mean it to be available 
to the collaboration to use.  The gotcha is that this is licensed, 
commercial optical engineering software, so we paid for it, and we paid 
for one license, so users will have to negotiate with each other so as 
not to step on each others work.  An additional complication is that we 
set up a Windows 10 machine that we can remote-desktop into, and that's 
also a one-at-a-time deal.  I got the license on a USB dongle so in 
principle, one could borrow the USB key and run the software on your own 
Windows machine, although the machine we set it up on is probably better 
than most Windows machines that people would have access to.

The software is called TracePro LC, you can look at the documentation here:

> http://www.lambdares.com/tracepro

The machine we set up is va093.phenix.bnl.gov and you need to tunnel to 
it; for reasons still not clear to us, VNC has problems and so we have 
been using Microsoft's Remote Desktop; there are clients for Windows and 
MacOS (I don't know about Linux).  The port that needs to be tunneled is 
3389; here is an example of the tunnel I use:

> -L 5941:va093.phenix.bnl.gov:3389

TracePro was developed under a NASA SBIR (yes, something useful 
developed under an SBIR), and Eric and I did some tests with an 
evaluation license which demonstrated that it was quite straightforward 
to use and had a large library of optical materials.  It is well suited 
for the kind of optical analysis we should be doing.  Of course, it 
could all be done with enough knowledge and a C compiler, but this 
software, like any good tool, makes it easier to set up and study a 
variety of configurations.  They also have excellent technical support, 
and are willing to work with us on the design.  Eric and I can show you 
some of the things we've studied with the eval license to get started.

There is also a borrowed license for Zemax Optic Studio, which is more a 
conventional optical design package, but nobody has spent any time 
looking into it. Peter Takacs in Instrumentation has loaned us the 
license if there is interest in working with it:

> http://www.zemax.com/os/opticstudio

Unfortunately, this system is a shared resource, so we'll have to figure 
out how to allocate it to people interested in using it, probably with 
some kind of sign-up list, but we should discuss in the coming 
calorimeter and collaboration meetings who might be interested and able 
to work with this software.

--
John Haggerty
email: haggerty AT bnl.gov
cell: 631 741 3358