[Bornagain-announcements] New release of BornAgain: version 1.17

[Gennady Pospelov]

This letter contains three announcements:

  * Publication of the BornAgain reference paper in J. Appl. Cryst.
  * Changes in development team
  * Release 1.17


    Reference paper

A comprehensive description of BornAgain has been published as an 
open-access article in the Journal of Applied Crystallography:

    G. Pospelov, W. Van Herck, J. Burle, J. M. Carmona Loaiza, C.
    Durniak, J. M. Fisher, M. Ganeva, D. Yurov and J. Wuttke, BornAgain:
    software for simulating and fitting grazing-incidence small-angle
    scattering. J. Appl. Cryst. 53, 262-276 (2020)

    http://scripts.iucr.org/cgi-bin/paper?S1600576719016789,
    https://doi.org/10.1107/S1600576719016789

This is intended to be the canonical reference for many years to come; 
please cite this article whenever refering to the BornAgain project. 
Additionally, please continue to document the use of a specific software 
version by an appropriate citation as suggested here 
<https://www.bornagainproject.org/documentation/howto/cite>.


    Change in development team

Walter Van Herck and Dmitry Yurov have left our group to reorient 
themselves geographically or/and career-wise. Walter has been one of the 
two lead developers since the start of the project in 2012. Dmitry 
joined in 2017 with funding from the European Spallation Source. We are 
very grateful to Walter and Dmitry for their lasting contributions to 
BornAgain.

In the meantime two new research software engineers have joined the 
team, Alexander Schober and Randolf Beerwerth. Alexander has been with 
the MLZ Scientific Computing Group since 2018, and has so far worked on 
two data reduction projects. He is now supporting Gennady in a deep 
overhaul of the GUI, in view of its generalization to reflectometry. 
Randolf has been with us since February 2020; he is currently working on 
the reflectometry core and on polarization support.


    Release 1.17.0

Today, BornAgain 1.17.0 <https://www.bornagainproject.org/download/> has 
been released.

New Core functionality includes the Nevot-Croce roughness model, support 
for switching between roughness models and reflectometry engines, and a 
few new form factors (cantellated cubes, rectangular ripples). The API 
has changed for ripples, as described in a new section of the form 
factor catalog.

Changes in the GUI mainly address visual issues on high-resolution 
displays. This may result in some compatibility issues with previous 
versions.

Much of this release is devoted to internal consolidation and speedup.

  * Standard reflectometry computations become ill conditioned at
    vanishing transmissions. Previously, we addressed this issue with a
    bifurcation. We have now implemented a new linear algorithm that is
    much faster for samples with many layers.
  * The spheroid form factor is now computed without numeric
    integration. Thanks to Matt Thompson (Australian National
    University) for the suggestion.
  * Continuous integration tests have been put under control of GitHub
    Actions, and tentatively been moved to GitHub’s own cloud service.
    This will reduce waiting times, and thereby make development faster
    and smoother. Thanks to Andrew Nelson (ANSTO) for insights from the
    GitHub Actions script he wrote as part of his reflectometry software
    cross-validation efforts.

We have stopped distributing BornAgain for Python 2.7. We recommend 
switching to the latest Python, 3.8. The CMake minimum required version 
has changed to 3.14. The minimum supported MacOS version is now 10.13. 
For building under Linux, we recommend Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal / Debian 
11 bullseye.

There are three new examples:

  * Specular simulation with different roughness models
    <https://www.bornagainproject.org/documentation/examples/reflectometry/roughness-model/>
  * Basic polarized reflectometry
    <https://www.bornagainproject.org/documentation/examples/reflectometry/basic-polarized-reflectometry/>
  * Reflectometry: Real life fitting
    <https://www.bornagainproject.org/documentation/examples/fitting/extended/real-life-reflectometry/>

More details are in the CHANGELOG, the issue tracker 
<http://apps.jcns.fz-juelich.de/redmine/versions/51>, and the git history.

As always, we very much welcome your comments and feedback!

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