Monday 24 March 2014

Welcoming the DIRHB code into the fold

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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