Simple, fast, and versatile C++ library to perform nuclear decay calculations, retrieve nuclide information, and compute decay products.
ENSDF provides a wealth of raw nuclear information, the Bateman equations are well known, but tasks such as determining what gammas will be produced, or the activities of child products from a 20 year old sample of 226-Ra, can still be formidable. SandiaDecay makes performing calculations like these easy.
An example of using this library to perform these calculations is:
#include "SandiaDecay.h"
...
//Initialize the database from the XML file that has all the nuclear info
SandiaDecay::SandiaDecayDataBase database( "sandia.decay.xml" );
//Get pointer to Ra226. "Ra226", "Ra-226", "226Ra", etc are all equiv.
const SandiaDecay::Nuclide * const ra226 = database.nuclide( "Ra226" );
//Use a SandiaDecay::NuclideMixture object to perform the decay
SandiaDecay::NuclideMixture mixture;
//Add 1 mCi of Ra226 to the mixture
mixture.addNuclideByActivity( ra226, 0.001*SandiaDecay::curie );
//Get activities of Ra226 and all of its descendants after 20 years of aging
vector<SandiaDecay::NuclideActivityPair> activities = mixture.activity( 20*SandiaDecay::year );
for( size_t i = 0; i < activities.size(); ++i )
cout << activities[i].nuclide->symbol << " has activity "
<< activities[i].activity/SandiaDecay::curie << " curies\n";
//Get all of the x-rays and gammas the sample would produce
vector<SandiaDecay::EnergyRatePair> photons = mixture.photons( 20*SandiaDecay::year,
SandiaDecay::NuclideMixture::OrderByEnergy );
for( size_t i = 0; i < photons.size(); ++i )
cout << photons[i].numPerSecond << ", "
<< photons[i].energy << " keV photons/second\n";
See the sandia_decay_example.cpp file for more examples of things you can do with this library.
SandiaDecay was developed as part of InterSpec, but has since proven useful in a number of other applications.
If all you care about is performing decay calculations, grab a copy of InterSpec and open up its Nuclide Decay Info tool from the Tools menu. This will let you perform many types of decay calculations, visualize decay chains, and export activities or decay products to CSVs.
If you would like to do complex or specialized calculations, or you want to add nuclide decay capabilities to your application, you will need to compile and link to this library.
The only dependancies required to compile are rapidxml (which is included in the repository), and a C++≥03 compiler. There is a CMake based build file included, but because there are no configurations and the library only consists of a single header and source file, it should be simple to integrate in with your program no matter the build system you use.
To include this library with a CMake based project, just add the following to your CmakeLists.txt file:
add_subdirectory( path/to/SandiaDecay )
...
target_link_libraries( MyExe PRIVATE SandiaDecay )Or to compile and run the example use code:
cd /path/to/SandiaDecay
mkdir build; cd build
cmake ..
make
./examples/sandia_decay_example ../sandia.decay.xmlOr if you're on a UNIX system you could compile the example-use code using a simple command like:
g++ -I. -I3rdparty SandiaDecay.cpp ./examples/sandia_decay_example.cpp -o example.exeOn a 2017 macbook pro it takes about 100 ms to to initialize the a SandiaDecayDataBase object using
sandia.decay.nocoinc.min.xml, or about 225 ms using sandia.decay.xml, with the differences between the XML files being how human readable they are and the former not including gamma coincidence information (to save file size).
On average it takes about 200 μs to calculate a nuclides decay equations, which only needs to be done once for every nuclide you are interested in, and then about 20 μs to evaluate the decay equations and determine the decay product or activities for given time.
A SandiaDecayDataBase object allocates about 10 MB of memory during initialization. After initialization all operations are const operations, meaning a single SandiaDecayDataBase can be used in multiple threads without issues; no global variables are used, and except during construction of a SandiaDecayDataBase object, no files are accessed.
Source data in sandia.decay.xml is originally based on the ENSDF datasheets, with further corrections manually applied to compensate for parsing issues, or discrepencies in observed data by users of this library.
Parsing the ENSDF datasheets is a challenge, so there are almost certainly mistakes or bugs in sandia.decay.xml, and so the values returned by this library should not be considered definitive. If you do find any issues, please email wcjohns@sandia.gov or interspec@sandia.gov.
Will Johnson (wcjohns@sandia.gov or interspec@sandia.gov).
Code is written by Will Johnson (SNL), with sandia.decay.xml prepared by John Mattingly (now NCSU), Steve Horne (SNL), Greg Thoreson (SNL), Will Johnson, and others.
The source code for this project is licensed under the LGPL v2.1 License - see the LICENSE.md file for details
Copyright 2018 National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC (NTESS). Under the terms of Contract DE-NA0003525 with NTESS, the U.S. Government retains certain rights in this software.
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