midas-joint-ff-calibrate

Joint differentiable powder + FF-HEDM detector calibration.

The single-image powder calibration problem (Wright, Giacobbe & Lawrence Bright 2022 § 3; midas_calibrate_v2 paper § 9) is rank-deficient on per-panel (δy, δz) shifts: each panel's η coverage is too narrow to break the radial-vs-azimuthal degeneracy without translating the detector to multiple distances. For a ~100 kg detector on a translation stage that's impractical.

This package solves the same problem at a single distance by combining the calibrant powder image with a co-located HEDM grain-fit dataset. HEDM spots are determinate in (R, η) and distribute across all panels at varied azimuth, so the joint Fisher block on per-panel shifts becomes full rank. The same machinery generalises to refining any subset of the unified spec — geometry, distortion, panels, wavelength, per-grain orientation/position/ strain, or arbitrary user-defined blocks.

Notebooks

Worked-example Jupyter notebooks live in notebooks/. They are not shipped with pip install — get them by cloning the MIDAS repository.

Start with 05_grain_tx_from_grains if you have an FF reconstruction in hand — it covers the one geometry parameter a powder calibration can never give you (tx), why it matters, and how to refine it. Notebooks 00–04 build up the joint-calibration theory behind the IUCrJ paper.

Grain-based tx — the powder-blind geometry

Powder/calibrant calibration cannot determine tx, the in-plane detector rotation about the beam: Debye–Scherrer rings are rotationally symmetric about that axis, so every value of tx fits equally well. Only single-crystal spots break the symmetry. An FF reconstruction calibrated on a standard therefore runs with tx = 0, and correcting it is a genuine second calibration pass.

midas-joint-ff-calibrate grain-tx \
    --paramstest  master_ff_params.txt \
    --layer-dir   recon/LayerNr_1 \
    --refine tx --kind angular --max-grains 50 \
    --out recon/LayerNr_1/paramstest_graintx.txt

Pass the master FF parameter file, not the stripped per-layer paramstest.txt the refiner consumes — the latter omits OmegaStep, NrFilesPerSweep and NrPixelsY/Z, which the forward model needs. Without them every predicted spot is invalid and you get matched spots = 0. (A guard raises on OmegaStep == 0 rather than failing silently.)

Also available as refine_geometry_from_grains() (library) and as an optional FF pipeline stage (midas-pipeline run ... --grain-geometry-run). tx enters at the transforms step, so benefiting from it means re-running the reconstruction with the corrected file. Only tx and Wedge can be refined here; see the notebook's Limitations section.

Architecture

                   midas_peakfit  (shared substrate)
                   ParameterSpec / pack / lm / laplace / TPSpline / Σ=0
                          ▲                       ▲
                          │                       │
              midas_calibrate_v2          midas_fit_grain
              (powder forward + loss)     (HEDM forward + loss)
                          ▲                       ▲
                          └──────────┬────────────┘
                                     │
                       midas_joint_ff_calibrate
                       (joint spec / loss / drivers)

Pure-Python, fully autograd-traced. No legacy C code (FitMultipleGrains.c is not used).

Drivers

• pipelines.alternating.AlternatingDriver — the recommended default. Outer loop alternates between (geometry + grain orientation/position) and (grain strain) passes. Cheap, robust.
• pipelines.full_joint.FullJointDriver — refine every refined parameter at once with a single LM call; report MAP plus Laplace covariance.
• pipelines.identifiability.fisher_block_rank — diagnostic that reports rank, condition number, and σ per parameter on a user-chosen Fisher block under powder-only, HEDM-only, or joint evidence.

Status

Pre-alpha. Companion paper to the J. Appl. Cryst. submission of midas_calibrate_v2 (paper 3); see dev/paper/.