Over the past few weeks the group set off on a joint adventure to digitise the famous photoionisation cross section dataset from Yeh and Lindau. Initally published in 1985 in Atomic Data and Nuclear Data Tables under the riveting title Atomic Subshell Photoioization Cross Sections and Asymmetry Parameters, this work has become one of the staple references for practitioners of spectroscopy far and wide. The only slight complication: the available online version is on the blurrier end of digitised PDF documents and it’s hard to search and copy out data points by hand, when you need them (automatic digitisation software doesn’t work very well due to the pixelation of the PDF).

This is why the group, under the expert leadership and organisational talent of Curran Kalha, embarked on a Covid-19 lock down activity of going through the tables of 103 elements, entering them one by one into a rather large excel file and then cross checking all entries. After an encouraging email exchange with Prof. Lindau we are now able to share the files with everyone who can make use of them. Go to the research subsection of our website to download the dataset. You can also find the dataset on figshare. Feel free to share widely and we hope it will help many of you!

A big THANK YOU to Curran, Nathalie, Carolina, Ebru, Yun and Jiebin who all contributed to this group effort!

PS: Our main motivation to do this was to now use the dataset to incorporate it into the Galore software package. This is happening as we speak so for all you pDOS lovers out there you should soon be able to use the full set of Yeh/Lindau cross sections in Galore.