Enhancement of Experiment Control in the Sonix+ Software Package

Publications, 06 May 2022

We offer to your attention a preprint “Enhancement of Experiment Control in the Sonix+ Software Package” P10-2022-4 published by the JINR Publishing Department. The authors are Kirilov A. S., Truntova L. A.

The work is devoted to enhancing the Sonix+ software package at the IBR-2 instruments to minimize the loss of measurement time when including mathematical operations (summing matrices, building spectral distributions of intensity based on data from the list of events, etc.) directly in the experimental procedure in the Python language (script). For this purpose, the execution of all such operations was separated from the main script into one or more background scripts. A special device class has been added to the complex structure to execute background scripts. Besides this, the checkpoint mechanism previously used to connect the user interface with the script has been replaced by a new one — based on Python language decorators and context managers. This significantly simplified the script, improved its reliability, and reduced the time of its development or modification.

The new version of the complex was tested in October 2021 on the NERA spectrometer. In the near future, similar versions are expected to be prepared for all other installations.

The investigation has been performed at the Frank Laboratory of Neutron Physics, JINR.