Just as Phaeacian men excel the world at sailing, driving
their swift ships on the open seas, so the women excel at
all the arts of weaving. That is Athena's gift to them
beyond all others -- a genius for lovely work, and a fine
mind too.
Homer, The Odyssey, Book 7
ATHENA is an interactive graphical utility
for processing EXAFS data. It handles most of the common
data handling chores of interest at the beamline or in
preparing your data to begin analysis. ATHENA
is a graphical front end to Matt Newville's
IFEFFIT library written entirely in the Perl
programming language and using the PGPLOT graphical
library for data display. It is being developed on Linux
and Windows XP, but should work on any unix-like or any
Windows operating system. The current version requires
IFEFFIT 1.2.5 or later.
- Convert raw data to mu(E)
- File import plugins for reading arbitrary data files
- Process and plot multiple data files simultaneously
- Merge data in energy, k-, R-, or back-transform k-space
- Energy calibration
- Align data scans with or without a reference
channel
- Deglitch mu(E) data
- Self-absorption corrections for fluorescence
spectra
- Compute difference spectra
- Fit peak functions to XANES data
- Fit linear combinations of standards to XANES
or EXAFS data
- Log-ratio/phase-difference analysis
- Background removal using the AUTOBK algorithm
- Normalization of XANES data to the Cromer-Liberman calculations
- Forward and backward Fourier transforms
- Save data as mu(E), normalized mu(E), chi(k),
chi(R), or back-transformed chi(k)
- Save project files, allowing you to return to your
analysis later
- ... and much, much more!
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ATHENA is software under development. While it
is working quite well, you are quite likely to find bugs
and other forms of misbehavior. If you download and use
ATHENA, I presume that you understand this and
that you will agree to report on your experiences so that
I may further improve the code.
ATHENA is free software, as are the things
upon which it depends: Perl,
IFEFFIT,
and PGPLOT.
See the license
for details.
ATHENA is only intended to
process XAFS data. Her sister program
ARTEMIS
is the fitting program.
Here is a list of features that ATHENA lacks. Some
of these will be in the eventual version 1.0. Others will not.
- Features that will go into Version 1.0
-
Functional normalization and Victoreen pre-edge removal.
-
Principle Component Analysis on the set of marked groups
-
Improve peak fitting dialog (implement some of the bells
and whistles from the LCF dialog):
-
Implement marked group fitting and a spreadsheet-able report
-
Adjust the data e0
-
toggle plotting of step component with "plot components"
-
what's the status of the minimize bug in Ifeffit that
effected fitting e0's?
- Documentation, documentation, documentation
- Features that will not be in version 1.0 (and an
explanation why.)
-
File type plugins for SPEC files and for applying deadtime
corrections.
-
These can be provided when/if needed using the plugin
architecture.
-
Data pages -- a way of organizing data in a project by having
more than one groups list in a project.
-
This would encourage
users to include many more data groups in a project. That
is, in principle, a reasonable goal. However, the current
state of memory management in IFEFFIT precludes
having more than about 60 groups in ATHENA.
This feature will have to
wait for IFEFFIT 2.0.
-
Import contents of `chi_data` folder in an Artemis project
into Athena.
-
This will be better implemented after DEMETER
is functional.
-
R and q space records, that is to be able to
read and write data in R and q space just as
easily as E or k space.
-
This has proven to be unnecessary.
- Internationalization. That is, build a
framework for having text strings read from
external files and for the language to be a
configuration option.
-
Although I consider I18N to be
a very laudable goal, this would require a major rewrite of
the GUI code.
-
Improved data import from the web, perhaps in conjunction with a
revamped standards data base.
-
Another fine idea, but a good standards database is not
"just around the corner".
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Parameters for background removal and Fourier transforms are set on
ATHENA's main screen. On the right is the list of groups
imported into the ATHENA project and the plotting controls.
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The linear combination fitting dialog. Fits can be performed in
energy or wavenumber. Many bells and whistles are available,
including combinatorial fitting of all imported standards.
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The self absorption correction dialog. Self-absorption corrections can be
applied to data using one of four correction schemes, one of which can be
applied to mu(E) and all of which can be applied to chi(k).
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The deglitching dialog. Glitches can be removed point-by-point of using a simple
algorithm.
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Some people decided to make knowledge into property. That wasn't
capitalism speaking; that was a greedy scam. There wasn't anything
normatively acceptable about it. It contravened the freedom of speech
and ideas. We [don't] engage in it because it [excludes] people from
ideas.
Eban Moglan, General Counsel, Free Software Foundation
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