libdEdx 1.2.0 released - stopping powers for the masses!

Our master's student Jakob Toftegaard has been very busy lately, and we're now ready to release a new version of the open-source stopping power library libdEdx - version 1.2.0.

Changes to the last version 1.0 are

• first of all: a new, nice and clean API. This breaks compatibility with 1.0, but we will do our best to avoid this happening again in the future. (We now have extensive use of structs, which can be extended with new members.)
• generic ICRU table included, which combines ICRU49 and the revised ICRU73.
• all four calculation modes in MSTAR are now supported, the default is that recommended by Helmut Paul.
• aggregate state can be specified, following ICRU recommendations
• I-values can be overridden for analytical functions (BETHE_EXT)
• provides a bunch of new functions
• calculate CSDA range
• inverse range lookup - a given range will return required particle energy in CSDA approximation. (Yes, this is the feature you have been waiting for all your life!)
• inverse dEdx lookup - a given stopping power will yield an energy (either high or low value, depending on what the user requested)
• version string of libdEdx can be accessed
• memory leak fixes
• typo fixes in material lists
• code should now be thread-safe

And were just getting started!

A real gem is our new web based frontend at http://dedx.au.dk to libdEdx. Here you can lookup stopping power functions using various tables and energies, use it as a supplement to those from NIST. The website includes a nice plotting feature as well, where you can add multiple plots for comparison.

The web frontend is still in beta-testing phase and may reside in this state for a long time. Any feedback is appreciated.

We have a lot of plans regarding how to continue with this. In the next version of libdEdx we plan to include more features such as

• more Bethe-based stopping power functions such as
• Bethe-Bloch
• Bethe-Bloch-Barkas

We also would like to include additional stopping power programs such as ESTAR, ATIMA and SRIM (just the stopping power part, of course), yet the outcome will depend on the willingness of the respective authors to contribute.

• algorithms for nuclear stopping power
• … and a surprise which we won’t reveal yet … :-)

Other contributors will be most welcome, the project is available on sourceforge for inspection.

We greatly acknowledge our hero Helmut Paul for contributing to the development with very fruitful discussions and suggestions. We also acknowledge the permission from the ICRU to use their stopping power tables in libdEdx.

Yet, we do not claim that the produced results are correct in any way, so any use of the data are on own risk. Nonetheless, if you DO find discrepancies, errors, misbehaviour of code, we would really appreciate if you tell us.

Enjoy!