athena1

Usage

Overview

This manpage documents the athena program, for interactive XAS data processing, including converting raw data to mu(E), aligning, merging, deglitching, Fourier transforming, and plotting. Basically, Athena is intended to handle all chores involving XAS data except for quantitative analysis by fitting to theoretical standards. Athena's sister program Artemis is the fitting program.

Athena has two interesting and unusual features. The first is that there are no buttons for explicitly removing the background from mu(E) data or for performing Fourier transforms. The only active buttons displayed on the main window are for plotting. Athena always knows when data requires a background removal or a Fourier transform and will perform the necessary analysis steps before displaying the plot.

The second interesting feature is that it is just as easy to perform analysis and plotting chores on multiple data sets as on an individual data set. Athena automates the most common data processing chores and automatically generates plots of one or more data sets.

References

Here are the relevant URLs:

IFEFFIT

http://cars.uchicago.edu/ifeffit

PGPLOT

http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~tjp/pgplot/

Perl

http://www.perl.com

perl/Tk

http://www.lehigh.edu/~sol0/ptk/

Central atom phase shifts

http://leonardo.phys.washington.edu/~ravel/software/feff_tables/

Missing features

You betcha! Lots! Here's a partial list:

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Principal Component Analysis on the set of marked groups

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XANES analysis by fitting a sum of scans to an unknown

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Dead-time and self-absorption corrections

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Handle dispersive data sets, i.e. data sets wherein the I0 and IT measurements are in separate data files becuase the data were obtained sequentially

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Calibrate dispersive data to a trusted standard

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Handle SPEC files. An independent perl module would be ideal. This is a project some eager contributor could tackle without having to delve into ATHENA's source code.

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Alignment of scans using a reference, either of the same edge or of a nearby edge. (Any suggestions? I am lacking a good idea about how to implement this...)

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Formulas for the energy axis (useful for converting encoder readings to energy values)

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R and q space records, that is to be able to read and write data in R and q space just as easily as E or k space.

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Internationalization. That is, build a framework for having text strings read from external files and for the language to be a configuration option.

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Documentation, documentation, documentation

What's in a name?

Athena was the goddess of wisdom and is also associated with skill and justice. Those are all good qualities for a data analysis program!

Options

This program requires no options.