You've got your favourite tracking code running, what now? This package is a post-processor for taking beam data to calculate beam emittance, Twiss functions, etc. Also includes bindings to plotting packages ROOT and matplotlib, and a whole lot more!

Download and Installation: You can download the latest version from the code repository hosted on sourceforge. This is mirrored on launchpad.

: Installation instructions are in the README file, but you probably have to do something like:

: tar -xzf xboa-<version>.tar.gz

cd xboa-<version>

python setup.py build

sudo python setup.py install

: At the moment only Linux is supported, but windows support would be pretty easy to implement if there was demand.

Running: When doing any physics analysis beyond the most basic, one really wants to be able to manipulate the analysis in various ways. For any detailed analysis, physicists will want to make cuts and calculate different variables in different ways. For this reason x-boa really provides just a library of physics analysis functions. Examples of how to use it are provided, but once physicists get going they can really push the analysis however they like.

Examples

There are several example scripts in the xboa/examples directory that are good to start with:

xboa/examples/Example_1.py Load and access particle data
xboa/examples/Example_2.py Load data and make some plots
xboa/examples/Example_3.py Make some cuts before plotting
xboa/examples/Example_4.py Apply a transformation before plotting
xboa/examples/closed_orbit.py Find a closed orbit

: They take you through the steps required to load particle tracking data, access it, make plots and manipulate it in various ways. There is also a script that almost clones the functionality of the ecalc9f code developed by Greg Penn and Rick Fernow, XBOA9f.py

Modules

Three modules are available

common contains some useful general purpose routines including general plotting routines
hit module provides the Hit class and other interfaces to individual monte carlo Hits (e.g. particles traversing some output plane)
bunch module provides the Bunch class and other interfaces to operations on groups of particles (e.g. moment and Twiss parameter calculation)
tracking provides an interface to tracking for use by the algorithms module
algorithms provides a library many for common accelerator physics functions such as finding closed orbits

Additionally, there is some C code hiding "under the bonnet"

Authors: Chris Rogers chris.nosp@m..rog.nosp@m.ers@s.nosp@m.tfc..nosp@m.ac.uk