The optical coordinates used in the S800 are described in relation to a central trajectory passing through the center of the S800 magnets, and with the reference momentum given by p₀=qBρ₀, where ρ₀ is the central bend radius for the dipole, B is the dipole field and q is the ionic charge. These are the longitudinal distance z along the reference path, and the transversal distances x and y (perpendicular to z) with respect to the reference trajectory in the dispersive and non-dispersive directions, respectively. (Note that since the S800 bending dipoles are oriented vertically, the coordinate x corresponds to the vertical direction, while y refers to the horizontal direction.) The dispersive and non-dispersive angles a and b are referred with respect to the z axis in the xz-plane and yz-plane, respectively. The momentum coordinate δ is defined according to the equation δ + 1 = p / p₀, where p is the momentum of the particle. The energy coordinate d is defined as d= (E-E₀) / E₀, being E the energy of the particle and E₀ the energy equivalent to p₀.

With the exception of the sextupole in front of the S800 spectrograph and the trim coils, the aberrations—introduced mostly by the fringe fields of the magnets—are calculated and corrected analytically based on measured field maps. This method ¹⁾) uses the ion optics code COSY Infinity to calculate the transfer matrix S from the target to the focal plane, including aberrations up to 5^th order. The precision attained with the 5^th order is comparable to the resolution of the position-sensitive detectors in the focal plane. The tracking algorithm inverts the matrix S before applying it to the coordinates measured at the focal plane on an event-by-event fashion, according to the equation (a_t y_t b_t d_t) = S^-1 (x_f a_f y_f b_f). The subindexes t and f refer to the positions behind the target and at the focal plane, respectively. The positions measured with the two CRDCs are used to determine the position x_f and y_f, and angles a_f and b_f at the focal plane. The main advantage of this method is the fast processing of the data as it avoids the tracking of each individual particle in the magnetic fields of the spectrograph. The standard S800 SpecTcl analysis software provides all necessary functions and interfaces to perform these calculations.

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