 |
| DESCRIPTION |
| Hotstop is scientific software that allows
to extract experimental ion stopping force curves from RBS spectra (as
well as to estimate uncertainties) It uses Simulated Annealing and
Bayesian Inference algorithms. See the FAQs and
the Publications
for
more information. Go to the download
section if you want to get the program. Hotstop is a free ( GPL ) console application (this means console under GNU/Linux and DOS window under M$ windows). It is not very user-friendly because at this point the focus is in developing the physics of the program rather than in the interface. NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR ( Carlos Pascual-Izarra ): Note that I am not a professional programmer but a physicist. The code may not be neat, elegant or even standard-compliant (and for sure it is NOT bug-free). I just try to do my best and I hope that if you find something wrong, you contact me. |
| NEWS |
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| 21-03-2013: (Carlos)
|
Let's face it: Hotstop is dead... or better say frozen. Since I moved out of the IBA field, nobody has taken up the project, so I guess that's it. I just updated a few dead links in this page and I hope it will be useful as a log and for future reference. If anyone is interested in using the code, please contact me and I'll provide as much help as I can. |
| 26-05-2004: (Carlos)
|
Version 0.7.0 released. Finally another "medium version number" change. This time many things have changed. Specially, I implemented support for a Kalbitzer-type parameterization for fitting. This has fixed many issues with heavy ions and improved velocity of Simulated Annealing and Bayesian Inference by a factor of 3 (my analysis are done in ~30 minutes for 1 million steps). Summary of more significant changes are: -Hotstop supports Kalbitzer-like parameterization for fits (only 5 parameters needed). -"fitzbl" now called "hsfit" and supports also Kalbitzer parameterization. -hsfit generates automatically a "RUMP" macro that allows to load/unload stopping forces generated by Hotstop to test them with RUMP (even for compounds!). See the full list of changes in the changelog file. |
| 26-05-2004: (Carlos)
|
The pre-print for
the paper "An efficient method for stopping force determination" is now
available. You can download a pdf file or browse it in html
format in the section Publications
. I consider this paper to be fundamental
for understanding Hotstop. Also, stay alert for two more papers and a poster that I will publish (and upload as pre-prints) during next few months. |
| 27-04-2004: (Carlos)
|
Version 0.6.5 released. NOTE: I have noticed that most people is downloading old versions instead of the newest release. I strongly encourage to download the latest (at this time it is 0.6.5) Bugs are more likely to disappear than to appear in new versions!! It has been long time since last release, but some development was done meantime. Most significative changes are: -Calculation of the correction for non-ionizing collisions has been improved. -Another auxiliary program (under test now): nucphd. It creates tables with nuclear PHD data (non-ionizing correction). They can be used by Hotstop or exported to be used externally. -IMPORTANT: following a comment from N.P. Barradas, a correction has being made on BI calculation. A factor of 2 was missing in the error calculation so things were not done strictly well in previous programs. In practice, this was as considering that the input data errors were sqrt(2) lower. Now this is fixed. |
| 27-04-2004: (Carlos)
|
The paper has
been accepted. As soon as the copyright issues are cleared, I will
release a pre-print. |
| 27-02-2004: (Carlos)
|
I have submitted a
paper about how Hotstop works and giving an analysis example . If
everything goes well, I will add the pre-print at the Publications page
soon. |
| 27-02-2004: (Carlos)
|
Version 0.6.4 released.
Some very important changes (since 0.6.1 ,last released version). Most significative are: -Included nuclear stopping power calculation. -Included correction for non-ionizing collisions in active area of the detector (a very important source of non-linearities in calibration for low energies). -A new auxiliary program is now also distributed with Hotstop. It is called "fitZBL". It allows to fit a table of Stopping VS Energy to ZBL96-type coefficients and also extract "fake" coefficients for elements in compounds (very useful for testing Hotstop results with RUMP-like programs). -A major re-arrangement of the source code. Now it is more modular. The above are major changes. For a detailed list of the many other changes, see the Changelog |
| 16-01-2004: (Carlos)
|
Version 0.6.x released
for download. I have been working/testing the 0.6.0 version through
this
last month. I have been doing (and still am) heavy analysis with it and
including many many minor changes. As a result of all these changes I
release directly the version 0.6.1. Changes: -Bug corrected: the bug mentioned in last "new" has been corrected. -Change in RIS format: Now the feature ID is automatically constructed. -Command added ("ALIAS"): now you can define aliases to input values (making a lot more easier to change one parameter present in many files. -Command added ("SYSTEM") : it allows to do calls to system commands (such us to a plotting program) while in the batch process. -Change in "CALIBFIT" output. Now the automatic calibration output file is much more verbose. Amongst other things, it gives the calibration parameter with errors, the variance matrix, the residuals and the fitting points. |
| 14-12-2003: (Carlos)
|
OOOOPS!!! By the
time of releasing version 0.5.5, some changes had been made that were
not fully tested. And of course, Murphy laws apply. So version 0.5.5
doesn't work for its main purpose: determining stopping forces
--although all the other features do work (i.e. you can use it for
fitting any parameter EXCEPT stopping force for example, calibration
parameters). At this very moment I am doing intensive analysis using a corrected version of Hotstop in which I have added some features that were listed in the TO-DO's table. So I will release soon (after some more test) the version 0.6.0. |
| 09-12-2003: (Carlos)
|
Finally I was able
to launch the first release of packages in SourceForge. I have added
the source
code for the current version of Hotstop (0.5.5), as well as a binaries
package for M$ windows. This is the version I am using now for my analysis, so it is being tested right now (this means absolutely no warranty) |
| 07-12-2003: (Carlos)
|
I have been
able to compile Hotstop under M$ windows. A small patch to the source
allowed to compile via the usual "configure" and "make" using
MinGW+MSYS
. A win binary package as well as the source will be released soon. |
| 05-12-2003: (Carlos)
|
I start building the
"Hotstop Project Home Page". You may ask: what is the difference between this "Hotstop Project Home Page" (note the "project") and the previous "Hotstop Home Page" hosted in the UAM server? In short: from now on, consider the "Hotstop Home Page" as my personal page regarding Hotstop and the "Hotstop Project Home Page" as the official page for team of developers of Hotstop --which at the moment means "me" ;) The "Hotstop Project Home Page" is hosted by sourceforge.net and thus it must not contain any non-free stuff. As I am not sure of the legal status of the pre-prints of the papers I published related to Hotstop, I have chosen not to include that material here (but it is still available at my page at the university) |
| TO-DO's |
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Hotstop is in continuous development. I
add new features when I need them and have time. There are some points
that I would like to see done, but I haven't got time/knowledge to do
so. Please send any comments on them
or any suggestions or offer help. Here is a list of them:
|
| CONTACT |
| Developer: Hotstop was written as a part of Carlos Pascual-Izarra's PhD Thesis at CMAM, the accelerator lab at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain. You can contact me by email: cpascual_AT_users.sourceforge.net (replace "_AT_" by "@") |