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v12.6.0 March 2010
New features
- The main improvements in version 12.6.0 are to XSPEC's plotting
capabilities:
- Multi-panel plotting is now supported for all combinations except contour plots. For example, plot data model resid ratio will produce a 4-panel plot on a single page. Up to 6 panels can be plotted in this manner.
- There are many choices for axis units. These can be selected using the setplot energy and setplot wave commands. For example, setplot energy GeV uses GeV on the x- and y-axes. setplot wave also has a new perhz option for displaying the Y-axis in 1/Hz units.
- The setplot command has a new redshift <z> option for shifting displayed energies to the source frame.
- New models: ireflect is a convolution model based on the pexriv code. sirf is a multiblackbody self-irradiated funnel
- The normalizations on all power-law models (ie. powerlaw, bknpow, bkn2pow, cutoffpl)can be changed to a flux over an energy range by setting POW_EMIN and POW_EMAX keywords in xset. The powerlaw model then becomes equivalent to the pegpwlw model.
- The Compton reflection models (b/p)exr(a/i)v and (i)reflect have been restructured to use adaptive Gauss-Kronrod quadrature for the Greens' function integrals. The precision to which the integrals are calculated can be set allowing a trade-off between speed and precision.
- The wrapper functions additiveTable and multiplicativeTable give external C++ models access to XSPEC's table model interpolation routines (equivalent to the xsatbl and xsmtbl functions for Fortran models).
- The display of link expressions has been simplified to show only the parameter numbers and not the extraneous component information. Also show model will now only display the model components and not the individual parameters. The parameters can be seen with show parameters.
Additional enhancements previously released as patches to 12.5.1
- Added the solar abundance data set of Asplund, Grevesse, and Sauval (2006) to the list of available tables accessed with the abund command.
- New tclout nchan option for returning the number of channels in a spectrum. The save command now stores relative rather than absolute paths to allow easier porting to other machines.
- The recorn model component has been converted from a mixing to a multiplicative type. This allows a model to define multiple recorn components.
- A warning message is now issued if a user attempts to load a response for a source n when there are still slots to fill for source n-1. This is intended to catch cases where a user mistakenly reverses the source and spectrum number input to the response command.
Bug fixes
All bug fixes to v12.5.1 released as patches a - o are included in v12.6.0. In addition the following problems have been corrected:
- It was possible for the addition of a systematic model error to actually decrease the overall variance, when it was applied to a zero-variance bin that was artificially increased by XSPEC for chi-square fitting.
- Bug in plot ratio when using setplot wave with Hz units. Y-axis model values
were not displayed in plot.
- The comptt model no longer stops and prompts the user when it fails during its incomplete gamma calculation.
- The powerlaw model has been modified to avoid a numerical
instability that could occur if the index were within
to
of 1.0.