HDF5 File format for SMS

HDF5 is a file format designed for flexibility and the ability to storge large amounts of data.

In the Full SMS HDF5 format, one HDF5 file is used for a dataset. It contains a number of groups corresponding to measured particles, like this:

filename.h5
    ├ Particle 1
    ├ Particle 2
    ├ Particle 3
    ├ ..

Each “particle” contains datasets for photon “microtimes”, absolute arrival times, and spectra. It also contains the raster scan as an array:

filename.h5
    ├ Particle 1
    |   ├ Absolute Times (ns)
    |   ├ Absolute Times 2 (ns)
    |   ├ Intensity Trace (cps)
    |   ├ Micro Times (ns)
    |   ├ Micro Times 2 (ns)
    |   ├ Raster Scan
    |   ├ Spectra (counts\s)
    ├ Particle 2
    |   ├ Absolute Times (ns)
    |   ├ Absolute Times 2 (ns)
    |   ├ Intensity Trace (cps)
    |   ├ Micro Times (ns)
    |   ├ Micro Times 2 (ns)
    |   ├ Raster Scan
    |   ├ Spectra (counts\s)
    ├ Particle 3
    |   ├ ..

Furthermore, the file itself, the particles and the datasets can have so-called attributes. A full list of attributes can be found in Full SMS HDF5 file specification (Version 1.08). As changes need to be made to the file format specification from time to time, a versioning system is used to ensure that older measurement files can be read correctly by Full SMS. The current version is 1.08. Documentation for older versions will be added to this wiki in due course.

The module used for reading files is smsh5_file_reader.