Ian M George: RXTE Software & Analysis Crib Sheets

These pages are unofficial in all respects. They are primarily simply notes to myself regarding the installation on lancelot. The information is not guaranteed to be correct or up-to-date.

Spectral Analysis using XSPEC

Before starting this stage, you need to have constructed
  1. a source PHA file
  2. a background PHA file
  3. an appropriate spectral response matrix
See the Combining Spectra step for how to do this.

There are several other pieces of information one will need:

  • the redshift of the source
  • the Galactic line-of-sight column density for the source
Ask me for the values.

We will be using the xspec spectral analysis package (see also its Home Page). This is primarily interactive software using a command-line interface. Some of the commands are not immediately obvious. There is an on-line help. However the HTML manual is probably easier.

Set-up

For this example, we assume we have ...
a source PHA file abcd.pha
a background PHA file abcd_bkg.pha
a response file abcd.rsp

Fire up xspec 

xspec
xspec> data abcd.pha ... reads in the source PHA file
xspec> back abcd_bkg.pha ... reads in the background PHA file
xspec> resp abcd.rsp ... reads in the response file
xspec> save files abcd_data.xcm ... writes and "xcm" file for use later
xspec> cpd /xw ... changes the plot device to a pop-up xwindow
xspec> setp energy ... changes plotting so that energy is always displayed as the x-axis

"Standard" Fits

There are several fits that should be done on all datasets:
RXTE Analysis Crib sheets
Other CribSheets
Ian M George Home Page