becquerel

Becquerel is a Python package for analyzing nuclear spectroscopic measurements. The core functionalities are reading and writing different spectrum file types, fitting spectral features, performing detector calibrations, and interpreting measurement results. It includes tools for plotting radiation spectra as well as convenient access to tabulated nuclear data, and it will include fits of different spectral features. It relies heavily on the standard scientific Python stack of numpy, scipy, matplotlib, and pandas. It is intended to be general-purpose enough that it can be useful to anyone from an undergraduate taking a laboratory course to the advanced researcher.

Installation

pip install becquerel

Features in development (contributions welcome!)

• Reading additional Spectrum file types (N42, CHN, CSV)
• Writing Spectrum objects to various standard formats
• Fitting spectral features with Poisson likelihood

If you are interested in contributing or are want to install the package from source, please see the instructions in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Reporting issues

When reporting issues with becquerel, please provide a minimum working example to help identify the problem and tag the issue as a bug.

Feature requests

For a feature request, please create an issue and label it as a new feature.

Dependencies

External dependencies are listed in requirements.txt and will be installed automatically with the standard pip installation. They can also be installed manually with the package manager of your choice (pip, conda, etc). The dependencies beautifulsoup4, lxml and html5lib are necessary for pandas.

Developers require additional requirements which are listed in requirements-dev.txt. We use pytest for unit testing, black for code formatting and are converting to numpydoc.

Copyright Notice

becquerel (bq) Copyright (c) 2017-2021, The Regents of the University of California, through Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (subject to receipt of any required approvals from the U.S. Dept. of Energy) and University of California, Berkeley. All rights reserved.

If you have questions about your rights to use or distribute this software, please contact Berkeley Lab's Intellectual Property Office at IPO@lbl.gov.

NOTICE. This Software was developed under funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Government consequently retains certain rights. As such, the U.S. Government has been granted for itself and others acting on its behalf a paid-up, nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license in the Software to reproduce, distribute copies to the public, prepare derivative works, and perform publicly and display publicly, and to permit others to do so.