NCrystal release 4.4.0

[tkittel]

This release brings support of a new strain cfg-string parameter, which can be used to easily model isotropic strain with a uniform expansion or contraction of crystal lattice vectors. If nonzero, crystal unit cell dimensions will be scaled with a factor of (1+strain), while keeping angles and relative atomic positions fixed. So for instance, "stdlib::Be_sg194.ncmat;strain=0.01" will cause the values of all lattice parameters (a, b, and c) to be increased by 1%. This in turn means that d-spacings of crystal reflections will also increase by 1%, but also structure factors (F^2) will be affected - although in a less regular fashion.

In addition to the support for strain, the release also brings a few other fixes and improvements. Most notably, the internal caching related to inelastic physics processes was much improved, with potential significant savings on material initialisation time or memory usage. For all the details of the release, refer to the CHANGELOG or the full code diff.

---

This discussion was created from the release NCrystal release 4.4.0.