NXcanSAS v1.1

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Latest News

2024-09 : Proposals for NXcanSAS v1.1 in development

Overview

Since its release in 2017, the NXcanSAS format has served the community well, but mostly in the role of an HDF equivalent to the CanSAS1D XML format. However, as is evident in its founding discussions, far greater functionality was originally envisaged. Advances in instrumentation and science are now starting to push at the boundaries of NXcanSAS v1.0. One such area is what may be termed Magnetic-SANS which encompasses a number of different SANS techniques involving manipulation of the neutron spin. To meet the needs of this area revisions are required to both NXcanSAS v1.0 and NeXus.

The Magnetic-SANS Problem

To reliably and unambigulously interpret Magnetic-SANS data it is necessary to know the spin history of the neutrons during the measurement. This, in turn, requires NXcanSAS to:

• have a way to include the spin state (ie, polarisation) information with the SANS data;
• have a way to denote the spin states;
• have a way to identify the type of Magnetic-SANS technique that generated the data, and;
• to include metadata relating to the spin manipulating devices (order encountered, type, etc) used during the measurement of the data.

NXcanSAS v1.0 and NeXus provide for some, but alas not all, of this information.

v1.1 Sub-group

• Dirk Honecker (ISIS)
• Steve King (ISIS & CanSAS)
• Annika Stellhorn (ESS)
• Lucas Wilkins (ISIS Data Scientist)

Proposals

For NXcanSAS v1.1

PROPOSAL 1: That the spin states simply be included as additional data axes within <SASdata/>. This functionality is already part of v1.0, but perhaps had not been envisaged for this particular use case! Aside: This proposal does mean that every Q point will have associated spin state information (if the file contains Magnetic-SANS data), but this can be leveraged to address other requirements (see below), and the overhead is tiny. It also means the spin state data is directly available to a file reader. An alternative that was considered was something like <SASdata name="title" spin_state="value"/>, but this was rejected because it would a) require processing and b) require something else to denote the type of Magnetic-SANS measurement.

PROPOSAL 2: That the additional spin

For NeXus

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Pseudo-code Example

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