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Bug#517945: ITP: libxray-absorption-perl -- x-ray absorption data for the elements




Hi Andreas:

On Tue, 3 Mar 2009, Andreas Tille wrote:

On Mon, 2 Mar 2009, Carlo Segre wrote:

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Carlo Segre <segre@debian.org>


* Package name    : libxray-absorption-perl
 Version         : 2.0.1
 Upstream Author : Bruce Ravel <bravel@bnl.gov>
* URL             : http://cars9.uchicago.edu/svn/libperlxray
* License         : Artistic
 Programming Lang: Perl
 Description     : x-ray absorption data for the elements

This module supports access to X-ray absorption data.  It is designed
to be a transparent interface to absorption data from a variety of
sources.  Currently, the only sources of data are the 1969 McMaster
tables, the 1999 Elam tables, the 1993 Henke tables, and the 1995
Chantler tables.  The Brennan-Cowen implementation of the
Cromer-Liberman tables is available as a drop-on-top addition to this
package.  More resources can be added easily.

Hi Carlo,

can you imagine applications where this "variety of sources" includes
x-ray data from medical care?  I'm wondering whether this package might
be an interesting target for the Debian Med physics task.  Or are the
ITPed packages rather targeting at particle physics and do not really
targeting at medical care?

IMHO it would not harm if you would add the answer to this question as
a separate paragraph to the description.


Hmm, the answer is that these modules allow the calculation of how matter absorbs xrays of different energies. The McMaster tables are the basic reference and have been extended by the Elam and Henke tables to provide additional quantities (fluorescence and total cross-section). The calculations can beused byt many different kinds of researchers, basically anyone who is interested in the interaction of x-rays with matter. I am sure that this includes medical physicists but I do not know if there are other tabulations of data specifically made for medical physics.

The calculations are probably not terribly useful to particle physicists though, more to condensed matter and materials physicists and chemists. These modules are necessary components for the horae suite of programs for analysis of x-ray absorption spectroscopy and they used to be hidden in the horae package but have been split out now.

i will certainly consider improving the long description in future releases. For now, i prefer to leave them in the incoming queue as they are.

carlo

--
Carlo U. Segre -- Professor of Physics
Associate Dean for Special Projects, Graduate College
Illinois Institute of Technology
Voice: 312.567.3498            Fax: 312.567.3494
segre@iit.edu   http://www.iit.edu/~segre   segre@debian.org



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