The first version of the PHOENIX program was created in 1995 by W. Sturhahn shortly after the discovery of synchrotron radiation based inelastic nuclear resonant scattering. The PHOENIX software was continuously improved to handle various data input formats and provide useful diagnosis tools for high-quality data evaluation. A detailed treatment of sound velocity extraction was added in 2007, and a graphical display option was provided in 2009.
PHOENIX supports all Mössbauer isotopes, the addition of raw data sets including normalization correction, the creation of an energy scale from angle and temperature data, a flexible procedure for the subtraction of the elastic peak, data normalization, detailed balance and moment calculation, a limited energy-range correction, the extraction of the partial phonon density-of-states using the Fourier-Log method, consistency checks, optional deconvolution, calculation of thermodynamic quantities, an extrapolation scheme to extract the Debye sound velocity as well as aggregate compressional and shear sound velocities.
The PHOENIX software was created by W. Sturhahn to offer traceable evaluation codes for publications using the NRIXS technique. The PHOENIX core programs are written in Fortran90 with wrappers using bash scripts. The GUI is implemented as Tcl/Tk script and requires Tcl and Tk versions 8.6 or higher to run. The PHOENIX software was extensively tested over the last two decades and was continuously improved to handle various data input formats and provide useful diagnosis tools for high-quality data evaluation. A graphical display option is standard with the GUI versions.
PHOENIX can been installed on UNIX-like operating systems, such as MacOS, Redhat-Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, Solaris etc. For MS-Windows like operating systems, the preferred method to run MINUTI is the installation of a virtual environment, e.g. VirtualBox, install a Linux-type guest system, and install PHOENIX on that guest system.