Tools to deal with (unresolved) point sources from the Cosmic X-ray Background (CXB) in soft X-ray spectra.
The CXB tools are written to help determining the contribution from unresolved X-ray sources to the background spectrum in X-ray spectra. They were especially written for the EPIC instruments aboard XMM-Newton. Please cite Mernier et al. (2015) and Zenodo 2575495 if you use this software for a scientific publication.
See the reference or doc/cxb.pdf for an explanation of the method used in this software.
This installation requires the CMake package to be installed on your system. On Linux, this can be installed through the package repository of your distribution. For MacOS, install packages can be downloaded from: CMake.org.
In addtion, the code depends on the GNU Scientific Library (GSL). This library can also be installed through the package manager of your distribution. On MacOS, this package needs to be compiled separately. For more information: GSL website.
For the cxbtools compilation, download or clone the source code from github:
user@unix:~> git clone https://github.com/jdeplaa/cxbtools.git
Then change to the cxbtools directory and run:
user@unix:~/cxbtools> cmake .
user@unix:~/cxbtools> make
If you want to install cxbtools in a system location, you can OPTIONALLY do:
user@unix:~/cxbtools> sudo make install
The excutables for the tools described in the next section can be found in the source code directory. See the CMake documentation for more install and compilation options.
There are three tools included:
CXBups is a program to calculate the remaining Cosmic X-ray Background flux after the exclusion of point sources up to a certain limit.
Usage: ./cxbups flux-limit area
Example: ./cxbups 3.E-15 0.0549
The flux-limit is in erg/cm^2/s The area is in square degrees.
CXBrnd is a program to calculate the remaining Cosmic X-ray Background flux after the exclusion of point sources up to a certain limit through Monte Carlo simulations.
Usage: ./cxbrnd flux-limit area niter
Example: ./cxbrnd 3.E-15 0.0549 1000
The flux-limit is in erg/cm^2/s The area is in square degrees.
CXBopt is a program to calculate optimal source extraction radius and flux cut for a certain annulus.
Usage: ./cxbopt source-cnts backg-counts region
Example: ./cxbopt 10000. 15000. 0.0549
The region area is in square degrees.