Introduction
XSPEC is a command-driven, interactive, X-ray spectral-fitting
program, designed to be completely detector-independent so that it can
be used for any spectrometer. XSPEC has been used to analyze data from
HEAO-1 A2, Einstein Observatory, EXOSAT, Ginga, ROSAT, BBXRT, ASCA,
CGRO, IUE, RXTE, Chandra, XMM-Newton, Integral/SPI, Fermi, Swift, Suzaku,
NuSTAR, AstroSat, Hitomi, Insight-HXMT, NICER, IXPE, Spectr-Roentgen-Gamma, and
XRISM. There are now almost 14,000 refereed papers listed on ADS which mention XSPEC.
This manual describes XSPEC v12, which is available on Linux and
MacOSX. The Python interface PyXspec is described in a
separate manual at
https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/xanadu/xspec/python/html/index.html.
New users are advised to read
Chapter 2, which introduces spectral fitting and
the XSPEC approach, Chapter 3, which gives an overview of
the program commands, and Chapter 4, which contains
walkthroughs of XSPEC sessions. They should then experiment with XSPEC
and, if necessary, look up individual commands in
Chapter 5, or descriptions of the spectral models in
use, in Chapter 6.
The user interface for XSPEC, which employs a tcl scripting shell and
the XSPEC parser, is described in Appendix A. The
statistical methods used within XSPEC are described in
Appendix B. Users interested in adding their
own models can read how to do so in
Appendix C. Appendix D describes
the PLT plotting package which XSPEC currently uses for graphical
output. Some of the tools (FTOOLS, programs, scripts) that can operate
on XSPEC files are listed in Appendix E. The
XSPEC model library can be linked into other programs following the
instructions in
Appendix F. Appendix G
describes how to use your own proposal distribution for Markov Chain
Monte Carlo. Appendix H includes some notes on the
changes between XSPEC v11 and v12. Appendix I
lists release notes for older versions of v12. Finally,
Appendix J defines some commonly used XSPEC terms.
Subsections
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Last modified: Friday, 23-Aug-2024 13:20:40 EDT
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