NSL - Neutron Scripting Language

A simulation of neutron resonance and polarisation
by Nicholas Devenish.

Overview

This project was written as part of a masters thesis investigating the polarization over time of ultra-cold neutrons inside a storage bottle, and the resonance effects involved with stray magnetic fields (specifically, the presence of a magnetic dipole).

Previously, a custom piece of software written by the professor was used. This was written in plain c, completely configured by compilation of header files which made it difficult to reliably reproduce results and settings by the fact that the program needed to be modified for every configuration. This implementation aimed to avoid that issue by creating a configuration file format "NSL", standing for N eutron S cripting L anguage. Examples of these script files can be found in scripts/*.nsl, and documentation of the file format properties can be found in doc/nslprops.txt.

Disclaimer: This was written quite some time ago, when I was certainly not as well versed with programming practices as I am now. I therefore take no responsibility for awful code that may be contained therein. Certainly, I learnt an awful lot about C++ whilst writing this project.

Requirements

Several pieces of software are required to build this package:

• Boost 1.34 (minimum) is required for the thread, filesystem, system and program_options modules. It may be possible to rewrite a couple of these dependencies, but threading is pretty ingrained.
• CMake 2.6 is used to generate the makefiles, to build the program.
• (Optionally) Doxygen to build the documentation.

Building

To build, you can follow the standard CMake prescription for an out-of-source build:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
... CMake output ...
$ make

And then the binaries neutron and nsltest will be deposited in the build/src subdirectory. By default, this will also build the class documentation, if Doxygen is installed.

License

This software is released under the MIT licence, notice seen below. If this isn't acceptable for you, I am happy to discuss licencing on a case-by-case basis.

Copyright (c) 2006-2012 Nicholas Devenish

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.