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v12.12 July 2021
New features
- New Models:
wdem Power-law differential emission measure. grbjet GRB prompt emission (Farinelli et al., 2021). rotpol Rotate polarization. zxipab Power-law distribution of ionized absorbers. - Updated Models:
- Table models have been enhanced to allow multiple spectra to be associated with each parameter grid point. The spectra to be used can then be selected using the XFLTnnnn keyword values. The keyword NFLTEXP gives the number of spectra at each grid point and the keywords XFXPnnnn hold the filter expression to determine which is used. At the moment the only filter expressions allowed are of the form “key:value” which match to XFLTnnnn keyword values in the spectra. The test application for this is spectropolarimetry.
- A new keyword ESCALE can be added to table model files. If true this automatically adds an Escale parameter to the model which is used to scale the energy when reading the model spectrum from the table.
- Table models with no interpolation parameters can now be read.
- Table model parameter names containing spaces are modified to use underbars instead of spaces to avoid problems.
- recorn has been changed from a multiplicative to a mixing model (this is for internal xspec reasons and should make no practical difference).
- Mixing models can now be calculated if there is only one datagroup.
- The creation of new mixing models has been simplified with the mixsetup program using the mixmodel.dat file to automatically create interface routines. In addition the MixUtility class now includes a number of useful methods which reduce the required knowledge of xspec internals.
- Markov Chain Monte Carlo:
- For the G-W algorithm the initial walkers are now set using the proposal distribution.
- Added new proposal distributions gauss deltas <value>and cauchy deltas <value>where <value>is a factor by which to multiply the parameter deltas.
- Fixed an error in the calculation of the Geweke
Convergence diagnostic which was too large by a factor of
.
- Added lognormal, gamma, cauchy, beta, student's t,
half-normal, power-law, isotropic, and shifted lognormal options
for Bayesian priors.
- Removed the word normalization from the y-axis of plots. This
will have little effect because the normalization is almost always
one. For the other cases setplot area performs a
similar function.
- The show command has new options frozen,
linked, tied (the last two are identical) which
print out the appropriate subsets of the parameters.
- An x preceding any xspec command name is interpreted as that
command name (eg xfit can be used for fit). This can be useful if you want
to alias a command name to do something else (eg if you want to
write your own Tcl script for fit which does other things as well as
running xfit).
- For the flux command when consecutive spectra in the
same datagroup have the same energies, all of the spectrum numbers
are now displayed rather than just the first.
- The ConvolutionInLnSpace template routine has been changed to
pass the index into the parameter array for the energy instead of the energy
itself. Also if the input energies are already log spaced then they
are not rebinned onto an internal array.
- Added Lodders et al 2009 to the table of solar abundances in abund.
Bug fixes
All bug fixes to v12.11 and v12.11.1 released as patches are included in v12.12. In addition, the following bugs have been fixed.
- External Fortran programs calling Xspec's xsatbl/xsmtbl functions would crash when Xspec wrote table model diagnostic output.
- Running nested scripts would cause a misleading error message to appear if the nested scripts were in different directories.
- The vmcflow model could cause a plotting crash when its redshift parameter was set to zero.
- plot eff was not working for newly created faked spectra, unless the spectra were removed and reloaded.
- When using setplot area for datasets whose responses had EBOUNDS energies listed in descending order (usual for gratings), the plotted results were the negative of the correct values.