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OPTIMISATION section: The routines computing the forces acting on the wire have been corrected after it had been found that mirror charges were in a few cases not properly taken into account (Pawel Majewski). An option has been added to compute the shape of the wire, which can be useful if the force acting on the wire depends in a non-trivial way on the sag.
A potential for a 3-dimensional point charge inside a round tube with a wire at its centre is being introduced. The potential is zero both on the tube wall and on the wire.
GAS section: Various keywords on the MAGBOLTZ command have been modified:
HIGH-PRECISION has been renamed SECOND-ORDER-TERMS LOW-PRECISION has been renamed FIRST-ORDER-TERMS ITERATE-ALPHA has been added SWITCH has been added
The latter option is recommended - for low field strengths, higher order terms are taken into account, for higher field strengths, the Townsend coefficients are privileged.
The gas identifier generated automatically by the MAGBOLTZ command rounded the fractions to the nearest integer percentage. This has been changed.
The graph of the Townsend and attachment coefficients made in response to the GAS-PLOT option, have been combined into a single plot.
PROGRESS-PRINT now has an effect on MIX and MAGBOLTZ.
DRIFT section: Track preparation and interpolation has been made 3-dimensional. Track preparation is now also available from the signal section. The interpolation routine has been made 15 % faster.
SIGNAL section: Most of the signal section has been rewritten, both to improve the accuracy and to permit more flexible simulation.
New are the following features:
Various changes have been made to existing commands:
The idea is to provide building blocks for making instructions like ARRIVAL based on signals. Since the needs of the users vary substantially, it does not seem meaningful to provide a complete instruction.
graphics: The WAIT-AFTER-PLOT is now respected when linking with HIGZ.
formulas: Clean-up of global variable re-usage.
A new data type, the matrix, has been added. With it comes a series of procedures.
Users are reminded that curly brackets should only be used to substitute expressions in terms of global variables into normal instructions. They should not be used after IF, DO, GLOBAL, CALL or PARSE (the control statements).
datasets and input / output: For Unix systems, a leading tilde and the environment variables are substituted in file names.
global options: The RNDM_initialisation option used to result in calls to RNDM only. Since this random number generator is being replaced by calls to RANLUX, also RANLUX is called a number of times now if the option has been selected.
compilation: The SP2 version is increasingly making use of the ESSL library, which is substantially faster than the equivalent CERN library routines (factors of order 25 are usual).
front-end programs and EXEC files
The INPUT_LISTING option has been added as command line argument.
Documentation
The Garfield manual and a set of examples can be found on WWW via http://consult.cern.ch/writeup/garfield.