Developing Software for the Beam Line Control Systems

Scientists from all around the world come to National Laboratories to perform X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) experiments. XAS experiments are used to determine the chemistry component of an object or material of interest. In a typical XAS experiment, the incident X-ray beam energy is varied in a region close to a fundamental electronic transition of the atom(s) of interest. The data has to be collected most densely in the immediate vicinity of the transition (also called edge). XAS scans are therefore often comprised of differently dense regions. The user can define how the data will be collected in each region by typing commands on the beam line console which can be tedious and time consuming. To facilitate this process we designed a graphical user interface (GUI) that will have all the necessary components for the user to define each region by simply typing in textboxes and using the mouse to click on labeled buttons which execute the desired event