Model fitting to small angle neutron scattering experimental data for archaeology

About

This project began as an internship at Centre for Energy Research in Budapest. The goal was to develop an automated procedure for analyzing 2D experimental data from small-angle neutron scattering measurements of archaeological pottery sherds. We specifically focused on the anisotropic inverse radial power ("Porod") model. We developed a custom preprocessing procedure followed by a maximum-likelihood fitting one to refine the parameters and compute uncertainties. This allowed us to reduce analysis times from several minutes to seconds per data file.

The whole procedure was implemented in a first software using C++11 with Qt 5.15. It was then further refined to improve robustness against experimental noise and to better fit the chosen model. The current version of the software is developed in Rust using iced.