Robert D. Cowan's Atomic Structure Code

This webpage serves as a repository for Robert D. Cowan's atomic structure codes.

These codes are described in detail in his text "The Theory of Atomic Structure and Spectra"

In the past his codes have been publicly available from the T-4 Atomic and Optical Theory group at LANL at this ftp address: ftp://aphysics.lanl.gov/pub/cowan/ where versions as recent as 2005 can be found.

I have been given permission by Robert Cowan to host his codes (and any updates he cares to send me) on this website as a service to the community. This is partly because he can no longer easily update the codes on the T-4 site due to security reasons.

    -    Cormac McGuinness, April 2007

Downloading

If you want to download, install and compile the Cowan code then download this file which has everything on this page: Cowan.tgz
    - last major update November 8th 2009
- last minor update December 30th 2009

Robert Cowan's atomic structure codes

The fortran source codes are as follows:

• A short description of the codes from the author
• readme - last updated November 2002
• RCN / RCN2 - Computation of Atomic Radial Wavefunctions
• RCN - Mod 36.2.5 - Dated: March 2004
• RCN2 - Mod 36.2 - Dated: February 2005
• Documentation by the author - (Revised February 2005) - pdf - txt
• RCG - Calculation of Atomic Energy Levels and Spectra
• RCG - Mod 11.5.4 - Dated: February 2007
• Documentation by the author - (Revised February 2005) - pdf - txt
• RCE -  LEAST-SQUARES FITTING OF ATOMIC ENERGY LEVELS
• RCE - Mod 20b - Dated: November 2001
• Documentation by the author - (Revised August 1993) - no pdf - txt

The copyright owner of the codes obviously lies with the authors, primarily Robert Cowan.

Downloading the codes

• For your convenience a single gzipped tar file with all of the source code (all versions), patches (see below) and original documentation from the author is CowanCode.tgz

Compiling the codes

• A compiler that can be used is the Intel fortran compiler which is freely available for non-commercial academic use on Linux, and the patches (see below) will allow for compilation with no warning errors.
• (Unfortunately g77 is no longer available on modern Linux distributions, and gfortran will not compile the code. Where g77 is available on older systems then g77 can be used also to compile the code.)
• Mostly the patches involve alignment of common blocks. Patches have been made for the latest versions addressing this issue to enable it to compile. These can be found in patches and are listed in this directory as "fixes".
• If you download the .tgz above then this can be unpacked on a Linux/unix machine by typing "tar zxvf CowanCode.tgz" and then:
1. Edit the "makefile" and change the DISTDIR variable to where you want the program to be isntalled.
2. Change the "FC" variable to either "g77", "ifort" or the name of your compiler.
3. Type "make" to compile and "make install" to install to your selected directory if compilation is successful.
• By default it will compile rcg.11.5.4.f and assumes you have the Intel compiler installed. It will also by default compile the codes in the original "LANL" versions and the ever-so-slightly modified "UCD" versions.

To be continued  https://www.tcd.ie/Physics/people/Cormac.McGuinness/Cowan/