In progress research

During my permanence at the TeSRE institute I am working on the archival and data analysis system for the high energy (15--300 keV) experiment Phoswich Detector System (PDS) aboard the Italian SAX satellite, scheduled to be launched at the end of 1995 [9]. The PDS consists of an array of four phoswich scintillation detectors (3mm NaI(Tl)/5cm CsI(Tl)), with a total geometric area of 800 cm, and field of view.

About the archival of data, we will use a commercial relational database (INGRES). Interactive transactions (queries) with the database will be handled by graphic interfaces created by 4GL script [5,6,7]. Programmatic transactions with the database will be performed using embedded SQL calls in Fortran and C programs.

I am developing the software for the analysis of the PDS calibration data, that will begin to arrive at our site during 1995. A very simple, first level analysis will involve the processing of spectra and pseudo images: determination of photopeak energies by fits with gaussians and/or laurentians; fits to rise--time peaks, etc. Then we will perform the trend analysis, in order to compute the response matrices of the instrument, to optimize the background rejection using pulse shape amplitude, to perform analysis of the stability of the detector using series of counts versus time or counts versus other parameters, to estimate the performance of the automatic gain control.

Most of the functions on data display and manipulations will be implemented using IDL. More scientific analysis will be performed using tools developed by us, C and Fortran programs and IDL procedures.

I have expertise in some programming languages (FORTRAN and Windows4GL --- a fourth generation language) under various operative systems (UIX and VAX/VMS). Furthermore, I am the WebMaster of out Institute, responsible of the Home Page of the SAX Project.