1.4  Overview

The McStas system documentation consists of the following major parts:

• The complete listing of changes related to the version McStas 3.9 is available in CHANGES document of the relevant download folder at https://download.mcstas.org/. Bugs are reported and traced using the McStas GitHub issue system[Git]. We will not present here an extensive list of corrections, and we let the reader refer to this bug reporting service for details. Only important changes are indicated in the CHANGES document. In addition to this manual, extensive and up-to-date documentation is maintained on the McStas/McCode GitHub wiki [Wik]:

  https://github.com/mccode-dev/McCode/wiki

  The wiki covers end-user tutorials, component development guides, GPU acceleration, and migration from McStas 2.x to 3.x.

• Chapter 2 concerns Monte Carlo techniques and simulation strategies in general

• Chapter 3 includes a brief introduction to the McStas system (section 3.2) as well a section (3.3) on running the compiler to produce simulations. Section 3.4 explains how to run the generated simulations. Running McStas on parallel computers require special attention and is discussed in section 3.7. A number of front-end programs are used to run the simulations and to aid in the data collection and analysis of the results. These user interfaces are described in section 3.5.

• The McStas meta-language is described in chapter 4. This chapter also describes a set of library functions and definitions that aid in the writing of simulations. See appendix A.2 for more details.

• The McStas component library contains a collection of well-tested, as well as user contributed, beam components that can be used in simulations. The McStas component library is documented in a separate manual and on the McStas web-page [Mcsa], but a short overview of these components is given in chapter 8 of the Manual.

As of this release of McStas support for simulating neutron polarization is strongly improved, e.g. by allowing nested magnetic fields, tabulated magnetic fields in numerical input files and by close to “full” support of polarization in all components. As this is the first stable release with these new features, functionality is likely to change. To reflect this, the documentation is still only available in the appendix of the Component manual. A list of library calls that may be used in component definitions appears in appendix A.2, and an explanation of the McStas terminology can be found in appendix B.6 of the Manual..