Monitoring and preventing collisions for a triple axis spectrometer

Neutron spectroscopy is a powerful tool to examine the fundamental properties of condensed matter, mostly using a so called triple axis spectrometer. A critical problem of this measurement procedure is the collision free and time optimized physical positioning of the instruments axes to the desired coordinates in momentum and energy space. This work shows the concept and the implementation of the library “paprika”, which is a control tool for neutron spectrometers, avoiding collisions and calculating a time optimized path. The tool was created for the PUMA, a triple axis spectrometer located at the new research reactor FRM-II in Garching near Munich. Furthermore it can be easily adopted to other applications.