CubeAid - an interactive method of quickly analyzing 3-dimensional gamma-ray data sets

With the advent of highly efficient gamma detector arrays capable of producing significant 4- and 5-fold data, a new challenge will be to develop appropriate data analysis techniques. One method may be to exploit the relatively fast analysis possible using three-dimensional (3D) analysis of sorted higher-fold data, as can be done using CubeAid software running on a personal computer (PC). This paper describes some of the capabilities of CubeAid. The main idea is to construct and use a 3D array (a cube) of triple data of dimensions suitable to the capability of a PC using VGA mode or higher. So far (as of the time of the conference), the authors had used a cube of edge size 640, and typically 2 or 3 keV per channel. In order to make data extraction fast, and to reduce disk space, a symmetrized 1/2 cube was used, the depth dimension having been compressed. In making this cube, sorting was first done into a symmetrized 1/6 cube from tape to a VAX hard disk. 2 figs