![[IViPP's Main Window]](figures/figure_1_1.png)
Figure 1.1. IViPP visualizing a particle physics simulation.
IViPP (“Interactive Visualizations in Particle Physics”) is a program that visually displays data from particle physics simulations. It reads data about the particles from a file and plots them as points and lines in 3D space.
IViPP is a cross-platform program, written in C++. It will run on any computer and operating system that supports C++, OpenGL, and the GTk+ user-interface toolkit. It has successfully been tested on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.
IViPP’s main purpose is to allow users to interact with the visualization. Users can rotate, translate, and zoom the display. Users can also use IViPP’s “clipping plane” tool to visually cut away parts of a data set in order to see the remainder in cross section. The details of these user interactions are described in chapter 4 of this manual. Users can also select a subset of the particle data based on certain properties the particles have. Selected particles can be highlighted when drawn, and unselected ones can be removed from view. Highlighted particles can be histogrammed by energy, and can be saved to files for processing by other programs. These things are done with IViPP’s “selector” tools. Selectors are described in detail in chapter 5 of this manual.
IViPP can read particle data and geometry data from various file formats created by the programs MCNP/MCNPX and TRIM/SRIM. When data is read from a file, it is added to IViPP’s database. The database is the collection of all particle and geometry data that has been loaded into IViPP. For details on opening files and loading data, see chapter 2 of this manual.
Figure 1.1 shows IViPP’s main display window. IViPP renders all visualizations in the upper section of this window, with axes for orientation. The X, Y, and Z axes are yellow, green, and blue, respectively.
IViPP displays error and status messages in the lower section of its main window. If IViPP prints more messages than can fit at one time in the message area, a scroll bar appears with which you can scroll through the messages. To remove all existing messages from the message area, use the “Clear Messages” command in IViPP’s “Edit” menu.
Users interact with IViPP through mouse movements and menus. The remainder of this manual describes the mouse motions that IViPP recognizes and its menus. Note that many menu commands have keyboard shortcuts, shown in the menus themselves. The “Controls” command in the “Help” menu also displays a table of major keyboard and mouse button commands.
Many IViPP windows contain fields in which users can enter text. You can generally type and edit text freely in these fields.
Text values entered into IViPP dialogs often don’t have any visible effect until you click an “OK,” “Update” or other similarly-named button—merely pressing the enter key will not necessarily make IViPP aware of the new value.
There are different ways to enter a number into a text field. You can either type the number itself, or use scientific notation using e.
Also, negative numbers and decimals are accepted.
Here are some examples of valid numeric input to a text field:
123
12.3
-12
1.23e4
1.23e-5
-1.23e4
IViPP is the product of many students and faculty at SUNY Geneseo. The program arises from an SRIM-specific visualizer developed in the spring of 2001 as a class project by Mark Valites and Dan Born. Jake Clements added many features of the current IViPP to this project, and contributed to the extensible design that is the hallmark of IViPP proper. Cindy Wong, Genevieve Herres, Elena Kornienko, Brian Aloisio, Hui Jiang, Ryan Kinal, Kristen Johnson, Heather Warren, Justin Hagstrom, Eric Squires, Nicole Loiacano, Elizabeth Skiba, Hieu Tran, Jeffrey Nathanson, and Marcos Davila coded most of the present IViPP.
Dr. Doug Baldwin oversees the IViPP project at SUNY Geneseo. Dr. Stephen Padalino and his students at Geneseo have been influential users of IViPP. External users who have provided important tests of IViPP and feedback to its developers include Dr. Sharon Stephenson and her students at Gettysburg College, Dr. Dan Casey at MIT, and Mr. Chad Forrest at the University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics.
The IViPP project has been funded throughout its history by the U. S. Department of Energy through the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester. Dr. Craig Sangster and Mr. Milton Shoup at LLE have been particularly supportive of the project.
Trademarks mentioned in this manul are as follows: “MCNP” is a trademark of Los Alamos National Security, LLC, Los Alamos National Laboratory. “MCNPX” is a trademark of the Regents of the University of California, Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Mac OS X” is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. “OpenGL” is a registered trademark of Silicon Graphics, Inc. “Windows” is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corp.
Return to the table of contents.
Next Chapter: Loading Particle and Geometry Data.