The new ‘BerSANS-PC’ software for reduction and treatment of small angle neutron scattering data

Abstract.Measurements on small angle neutron scattering (SANS) instruments are typically characterized by a large number of samples, short measurement times for the individual samples, and a frequent change of visiting scientist groups. Besides this, recent advances in instrumentation have led to more frequent measurements of kinetic sequences and a growing interest in analyzing two-dimensional scattering data, these requiring special software tools that enable the users to extract physically relevant information from the scattering data with a minimum of effort. The new ‘BerSANS-PC’ data-processing software has been developed at the Hahn-Meitner-Institut (HMI) in Berlin, Germany, to meet these requirements and to support an efficiently working guest-user service. Comprising some basic functions of the ‘BerSANS’ program available at the HMI and other institutes in the past, BerSANS-PC is a completely new development for network-independent use on local PCs with a full-feature graphical interface.