I recently got one of those emails that journals send me announcing recently-published articles. It came from Computer Physics Communications (CPC), an Elsevier journal that publishes a combination of articles on computational methods and actual computer programs which are made available (to journal subscribers) in a library. I published a paper there some years ago based on a program I wrote to calculate angular momentum coupling coefficients. I wrote it in the early stages of my PhD study, because I had very little idea of what I really ought to be doing, and thought it would be a nice excuse to learn some java. It occurred to me a little later that I could write it up and publish it, as well as having it available on a web page. It is not a hugely cited paper, though I did notice it appear in the footnote of Rowe and Wood's recentish book. There's a picture of my name in the footnote attached to this post. I do get some people coming up to me and telling me how useful they find my program. More useful than I find it, that's for sure. I don't think I've needed to evaluate any such coupling coefficients since I've finished my PhD.
Anyway. Back to that email from CPC. I noticed that there is a new computer program published by the Zagreb group which performs calculations of nuclei using the relativistic mean field method. It's quite complementary to the sort of thing I do, and I look forward to downloading it, having a play, and making use of it to throw in the mix of calculations when interpreting data. So far, the code has not quite made it to the download library, so I haven't played with it. The paper in CPC is available now, though, and for non-subscribers, the arXiv version is there for all (though with this sort of paper, it's not of so much interest unless you can also play with the code, too).
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