Engineering Diffraction

Overview

This custom interface integrates several tasks related to engineering diffraction. It provides functionality for calibration, focusing, and pre-processing of event mode data. Further extensions can be expected for future releases as it is under active development. Feedback is very much welcome. The following sections describe the different tabs or functionality areas of the interface.

../_images/Engineering_Diffraction_interface.png

General options

RB Number
To enable the GUI specify a RB Number (where “RB Number” usually denotes the experiment reference number at ISIS). This reference will be used for the output paths, so that files from different users and/or experiments can be kept separate.
Instrument
Select the instrument. Only ENGIN-X (ISIS) is supported in this version.
?
Shows this documentation page.
Close
Close the interface
Status at the bottom of the interface
A short message will be displayed which indicates whether the last important calculations finished successfully, and when the interface is busy calculating (calibrating, focusing, fitting, etc.).
  • Red Star Sign If a red star sign is displayed next to the Browse Button, it is mostly likely because the file specified has not been found. Error message can be viewed by hovering over the red star sign.

Calibration

This tab provides a graphical interface to calculate calibrations and visualize them.

It is possible to:

  • Generate a new calibration file (which becomes the new current calibration)
  • Load an existing calibration from a GSAS instrument parameters file previously generated

For the current calibration, the following parameters are displayed:

  • The vanadium run number
  • The calibration sample run number
  • The path to the output calibration file.

This calibration file output is a GSAS instrument parameters file (IPARM/PAR/PRM). The interface produces a calibration file containing all banks and in addition a calibration file for every individual bank. All the calibration files are written in the same directory.

With the help of Cropped Calibration user can also calibrate according to specific banks or by setting the Spectrum Numbers once the Cropped Calibration group box has been enabled.

The plot Calibrated Workspace check-box will enable user to plot vanadium curves and Ceria peaks. For Ceria peaks there will be two workspaces generated and plotted, one for each bank, whereas for a cropped calibration there will only be one workspace generated and plotted, depending on the selected bank or provided Spectrum IDs. The workspace contains difc and tzero data which is then utilised to plot the Ceria peaks per bank, the graph will plot Peaks Fitted and Difc/TZero Straight Line for comparison. More information regarding the fit peaks can be found on the EnggFitPeaks documentation.

The calibration files are written into two different output directories. First, they are written to a user specific directory which for the ENGIN-X instrument on Windows systems is:

C:\EnginX_Mantid\<Username>\<RBNumber>\Calibration

On UNIX based platforms this path is:

~/EnginX_Mantid/<Username>/<RBNumber>/Calibration

They are also copied into a general (all) output directory:

C:\EnginX_Mantid\Calibration on Windows or

~/EnginX_Mantid/Calibration on UNIX platforms.

The calibration parameters for each bank are made available for user inspection in a workspace named engggui_calibration_banks_parameters which is updated when new calibrations are loaded or calculated.

Parameters

These parameters are required to generate new calibrations:

Vanadium #
Number of the vanadium run used to correct calibration and experiment runs.
Calibration sample #
Number of the calibration sample run (for example Ceria run) used to calibrate experiment runs.
Bank Name:
This parameter is only required when Cropped Calibration is being carried out. The bank name can be selected from a drop down list with option of “North” and “South”, which are equivalent to 1 and 2 respectively. Custom bank mappings can be created by setting the Bank Name option to Use spectrum numbers. When the option Use Spectrum Numbers is set a bank name must be specified in Customise Bank Name.
Spectrum Numbers:
This parameter is only required when Cropped Calibration is being carried out, the parameter will set the spectrum numbers of the detectors, that should be considered in the calibration while all others will be ignored. This option cannot be used together with Bank Name, as they overlap. You may also give multiple ranges, for example: “0-100”, or “0-9”, “150-750”.
Customise Bank Name:
This parameter is only required when Cropped Calibration is being carried out with Spectrum Numbers, the parameter will set the workspace and .his file name according to this Bank Name provided by the user. However if the user does not provide a personalised name, the interface will use “cropped” as a default bank name.

The calibration process depends on several additional parameters and settings which can be modified in the Settings tab, see Settings for details.

Focus

Here it is possible to focus run files, by providing a run number or a range of run number to enable multi-run focusing, along with that the user may also select the files with the help of Browse button.

The focusing process uses the algorithm EnggFocus. In the documentation of the algorithm you can find the details on how the input runs are focused.

The interface will also create workspaces that can be inspected in the workspaces window:

  1. The engggui_focusing_input_ws workspace for the data being focused
  2. The engggui_focusing_output_ws... workspace for the corresponding focused data (where the ... denotes a suffix explained below).

Three focusing alternatives are provided:

  1. Normal focusing, which includes all the spectra from the input run.
  2. Cropped focusing, where several spectra or ranges of spectra can be specified, as a list separated by commas.
  3. Texture focusing, where the texture group of detectors is given in a Detector Grouping File.

Depending on the alternative chosen, the focusing operation will include different banks and/or combinations of spectra (detectors). The behavior for each option is as follows:

1. Normal focusing - All the selected banks and spectra present in the input runs are considered. The output focused workspace will be named with suffixes such as _bank_1, _bank_2, and so on

2. Cropped Focusing - All the banks are considered in principle but only a list of spectra provided manually are processed. The output focused workspace will be named with the suffix _cropped.

3. Texture Focusing - The banks are selected by a user-defined list of banks and corresponding spectrum numbers provided in a file. The output workspaces will be named with suffixes such as _texture_bank_1, _texture_bank_2, and so on. These suffixes are determined by the bank IDs given in the detector grouping file.

Cropped focusing and Texture focusing have been disabled by default to declutter the interface, but each section can be enabled simply by ticking the check-box next to Focus Cropped and Focus Texture.

For texture focusing, the detector grouping file is a text (csv) file with one line per bank. Each line must contain at least two numeric fields, where the first one specifies the bank ID, and the second and subsequent ones different spectrum numbers or ranges of spectrum numbers. For example:

# Bank ID, spectrum numbers
1, 205-210
2, 100, 102, 107
3, 300, 310, 320-329, 350-370

When a focus run process is being carried out, Focus Stop button will be enabled. Focus Stop button will allow the user to abort once the current focus run process has been completed. Inside the Result Log a warning message will be displayed with last successful run and total number of focus runs that could not be processed.

The focused data files are saved in NeXus format into the user specific and general directories (as with the calibration output files). That is the files are written into C:\EnginX_Mantid\User\<RBNumber>\Calibration and C:\EnginX_Mantid\Calibration on Windows, or ~/EnginX_Mantid/User/<RBNumber>/Calibration and ~/EnginX_Mantid/Calibration on UNIX platforms. See below for additional, optional outputs.

Run Number

The run provided to focus can be for example 228061-228063, this will run all the files within the given range as long as the file directories are included in the User Directories. The user may also provide an input of 228061-3 or 228061, 228062, 2280623 which should work the same way.

If a red star sign is displayed next to the Browse Button, it is mostly likely because the file specified has not been found. Error message can be viewed by hovering over the red star sign.

Checking the availability of all the files can take some time, for this reason it is also possible that a file may not have been found but the red star sign has not been displayed. If you manage to click Focus before red sign is displayed, the interface will process the last valid focus run instead.

Output

Under the output section, the user is provided with an option of plotting data in three different formats.

  • One Window - Replacing Plots: will replace the previous graph and plot a new graph on top.
  • One Window - Waterfall: will plot all the generated focused workspace graphs in one window which can be useful while comparing various graphs.
  • Multiple Windows - will plot graph in separate windows.

However, user may also change the Plot Data representation drop-down box while a run is being carried out. This will update the interface and plot workspace according to the new given input. For example, if a user has selected One Window - Replacing Plots and then decides to change it to One Window - Waterfall during a run, the interface will carry on by plotting Waterfall within the same window.

The user also has an option of saving GSS, XYE and OpenGenie formatted files by clicking the Output Files checkbox. This will generate three different files for each focused output workspace in Mantid. These files can be found with appropriate name within:

C:\EnginX_Mantid\<User>\<RBNumber>\Focus on Windows or

~/EnginX_Mantid/Foxus on UNIX systems.

The files are also copied to the general (all) output directory which is

C:\EnginX_Mantid\Focus on Windows

~/EnginX_Mantid/Focus under on UNIX systems

The Multiple Runs Focus Mode combo-box enables two alternative focus modes. Focus Individual Run Files Separately is the default option set, which allows user to run focus with multi-run files. Whereas the Focus Sum Of Files option merges all the multi-run number files together and applies the Focus Process to the merged file.

Pre-processing

Warning

This is a new capability that is currently in a very early stage of definition and implementation. Not all options may be supported and/or consistent at the moment.

The focusing options can be applied directly to histogram data. For event mode experiments, the event data (which would be loaded as event workspaces in Mantid) need to be pre-processed.

The simplest pre-processing option is “regular time binning” which will produce a histogram data workspace (as a Workspace2D). The only parameter required is the bin width. The workspace will be named with the following convention:

  • engggui_preproc_time_ws

When the input run file contains multiple workspaces (it would be loaded by Load as multiple EventWorkspace workspaces) the output workspace will be a group with the corresponding number of histogram workspaces, binned separately. This is the case when the input run file comes from a multi-period experiment. Note that the time bin can be a multiple of the pulse time.

A different way of pre-processing event data is by rebinning multi-period data by pulse times. In this case the input required is the time step for the binning (the x axis of the output will be time instead of time-of-flight). It is also possible to specify the number of periods that will be processed (starting from the first one). This type of pre-processing produces workspaces with the following naming convention:

  • engggui_preproc_by_pulse_time_ws

Focussing uses the algorithms Rebin and RebinByPulseTimes to bin the data in different ways when converting event data into histogram data.

Fitting

Warning

This is a new capability that is currently in a very early stage of definition and implementation. Not all options may be supported and/or consistent at the moment.

Warning

The input workspace must be converted into a focused file first. The steps to complete this are found here: Focus

The Fitting tab provides a graphical interface which fits an expected diffraction pattern and visualises them. The pattern is specified by providing a list of peak centre values where Bragg peaks are expected. These values can have units of either TOF of dSpacing but not both. The algorithm EnggFitPeaks is used to background fit peaks in those areas using a peak fitting function.

To use the Fitting tab, user is required to follow these steps:

  1. Load run(s) to perform fitting on by browsing for focused nexus files User may click Load button to load the focused file to the canvas
  2. List of expected peaks which can be either by browsing a (CSV) file, manually selecting peaks from the canvas using peak picker tool after loading the focused file or by entering the peaks list within the text-field
  3. Next click on the Fit button if you would like to fit single focused file or you can click Fit All button which will enable user to batch-process all the runs and banks when several files are loaded. Fit All process may also be used when a single run number is given or a file is browsed

Parameters

These parameters are required to process Fitting successfully:

Focused Run files:
.nxs files containing focused diffraction data. These should be the result of focusing data with the Focus tab.
Peaks:
A list of dSpacing values to be translated into TOF to find expected peaks. These peaks can be manually written or imported by selecting a (CSV) file.

Output

Once the Fit button has been clicked Mantid will process the data. Please wait until the Fitting process has completed. Upon completion you should be able to view the Fitting tab which will contain:

  • The focused workspace plotted in the background in gray crosses.
  • The expected peaks plotted in various colours overlapping the focused workspace peaks.

Within the Preview section a user is able to zoom-in or zoom-out as well as select, add and save peaks.

The interface will also generate workspaces that can be inspected in the workspaces window:

  1. The engggui_fitting_fitpeaks_param Table workspace with the parameters of the peaks found and fitted.
  2. The engggui_fitting_focused_ws Focused workspace also loaded so the fitted data can be compared with focused data
  3. The engggui_fitting_single_peaks workspace with each workspace index representing individual expected peak.

During the Fit process, SaveDiffFittingAscii algorithm will be utilised to save engggui_fitting_fitpeaks_param TableWorkspace as a csv file.

In the plots, the x or abscissa axis is in d-spacing units, which are more convenient for peak fitting than time-of-flight. However the run files and the focus files are normally stored as time-of-flight data. For this reason a conversion from the time-of-flight data to d-spacing is required. The conversion is performed using the current calibration of banks. The interface handles this internally and adds special sample logs to the fitting workspaces (engggui_fitting_single_peaks and engggui_fitting_focused_ws). By inspecting the sample logs of these workspaces. The conversion is performed using the GSAS equations, as calculated by the algorithm AlignDetectors

Preview

Once the fitting process has completed and you are able to view a focused workspace with listed expected peaks on the data plot, the Select Peak button should also be enabled. If the user choose to load the focus workspace or if fitting fails with the given peaks then the focused workspace will be plotted so that the user can select the peaks manually.

If you’ve run a fit but you can’t see the reconstructed peaks, make sure the checkbox Plot fitted peaks is checked - if the fit was successful, then clicking this should show the results. Equally, if you want to hide fitted peaks, just uncheck this box and they will disappear.

By clicking Select Peak button the peak picker tool can be activated. To select a peak simply hold Shift key and left-click on the graph near the peak’s center.

To get help selecting the center of the peak, you may set the peak width by left-click and drag horizontally, while holding Ctrl key as well. Users may also zoom-in to the graph by holding left-click and dragging a box on the plot, and zoom-out by left-clicking on the plot.

When user is happy with the center position of the peak, you may add the selected peak to Parameters list by clicking Add Peak button. User may rerun Fit process by clearing peaks list using Clear button and manually selecting peaking using Select Peak button or instead Save the peaks list in CSV file by clicking Save button.

User may plot single peak fitting workspace in separate window by using Plot To Separate Window button, if the engggui_fitting_single_peaks is available.

Settings

Controls several settings, including the input folders where the instrument run files can be found. Other advanced options can also be controlled to customize the way the underlying calculations are performed.

Calibration Parameters

The calibration settings are organized in three blocks:

  1. Input directories
  2. Pixel (full) calibration
  3. Advanced settings

The input directories will be used when looking for run files (Vanadium and Ceria). They effectively become part of the search path of Mantid when using this interface.

The pixel (full) calibration file contains the calibration details of every pixel of all banks, as produced by the algorithm EnggCalibrateFull. A default pixel calibration file is provided with Mantid packages. This calibration has been produced for the Vanadium and calibration sample (Ceria) runs indicated in the name of the calibration file. Note that this calibration is currently subject to changes, as the fitting of peaks is being refined.

The Following advanced settings are available to customize the behavior of this interface:

Force recalculate all existing Vanadium files
If this is enabled, Vanadium corrections will be recalculated even if previous correction results are available for the current Vanadium run number. This is not required unless a modification is done to the original Vanadium run file, or there is a change in the algorithms that calculate the corrections
Template .prm file
By changing this option you can Use a different template file for the output GSAS IPAR/PAR/PRM that is generated in the Calibration tab.
Rebin for Calibrate
This sets a rebin width parameter that can be used by underlying algorithms such as EnggCalibrate and EnggFocus

Algorithms

Most of the functionality provided by this interface is based on the engineering diffraction Mantid algorithms (which are named with the prefix Engg). This includes EnggCalibrate, EnggCalibrateFull, EnggVanadiumCorrections, EnggFocus, EnggFitPeaks and several other algorithms, explained in detail in the following Mantid algorithms documentation pages.

Categories: Interfaces | Diffraction