ENDFtk: A robust tool for reading and writing ENDF-formatted nuclear data

Abstract

ENDFtk is a recently developed C++ and Python interface to interact with ENDF-6 formatted nuclear data files. It provides a robust and complete interface, allowing the reading and writing of all formats currently part of the ENDF-6 formats manual, as well as some non-ENDF formats used by the NJOY processing code. It provides an interface that mimics the names in the ENDF-6 formats manual as well as an equivalent interface using human-readable attribute names. It is robust and powerful enogh for nuclear data experts to develop complex applications, while also simple enough to be used non-experts to retrieve and manipulate evaluated nuclear data. ENDFtk offers the ability to easily interrogate and manipulate data either in large-scale code projects or in simple Python scripts. In this paper, a brief overview of the interface is given, as well as more substantial examples demonstrating plotting simple data, interacting with more complex data, and writing new data to files. ENDFtk is open source and available for download via GitHub (https://github.com/njoy/ENDFtk).

Program summary

Program title: ENDFtk 1.0

CPC Library link to program files: https://doi.org/10.17632/9p4kxc2cvd.1

Developer's repository link: https://github.com/njoy/ENDFtk

Licensing provisions: BSD-3 clause

Programming language: C++ and Python

External routines/libraries: pybind11, ranges-v3, spdlog

Nature of problem: Provide an interface to read, write and manipulate nuclear data files using the ENDF-6 format. This interface can be integrated into other libraries requiring access to nuclear data, or be used directly using the Python interface.

Solution method: Library of C++ routines, with their Python bindings, to be integrated in higher-level codes and scripts