Most electron beam physics is considered in the context of a vacuum, but there are applications to long-range electron beam transmission in air. As particle acceleration sources become more compact, we may have the chance to take particle beams out to the real world. The example provided in the paper describes that of x-ray backscatter detectors, where significantly stronger signals could be achieved by scanning objects with electron beams. This paper forms the basis for a potential new mode of particle-beam research, and it is important to ensure the reproducibility of this work for groups who wish to explore the applications of this new technology.
The direct numerical simulations (DNS) for this paper were conducted using Basilisk (http://basilisk.fr/). As Basilisk is a free software program written in C, it can be readily installed on any Linux machine, and it should be straightforward to then run the driver code to re-produce the DNS from this paper. Given this, the numerical solutions presented in this paper are a result of many high-fidelity simulations, which each took approximately 24 CPU hours running between 4 to 8 cores. Hence the difficulty in reproducing the results should mainly be in the amount of computational resources it would take, so HPC resources will be required. The DNS in this paper were used to validate the presented analytical solutions, as well as extend the results to a longer timescale. Reproducing these numerical results will build confidence in these results, ensuring that they are independent of the system architecture they were produced on.
In theory, reproducing this paper should only require a clone of a public Git repository, and the execution of a Makefile (detailed in the README of the paper repository at https://github.com/psychoinformatics-de/paper-remodnav). We've set up our paper to be dynamically generated, retrieving and installing the relevant data and software automatically, and we've even created a tutorial about it, so that others can reuse the same setup for their work. Nevertheless, we've for example never tried it out across different operating systems - who knows whether it works on Windows? We'd love to share the tips and tricks we found to work, and even more love feedback on how to improve this further.
Metadata annotation is key to reproducibility in sequencing experiments. Reproducing this research using the scripts provided will also show the current level of annotation in years since 2015 when the paper was published.
Paper and codes+data have been published 4 years ago, will they still work? I always try to release data and codes to reproduce my papers, but I seldom receive feedback. It would be useful to have comments from a reproducers' team, in order to improve sharing for future research (I switched from MATLAB to Python already).
This paper shows a fun and interesting simulation result. I find it (of course) very important that our results are reproducible. In this paper, however, we did not include the exact code for these specific simulations, but the results should be reproducible using the code of our previous paper in PLOS Computational Biology (Van Oers, Rens et al. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003774). I am genuinely curious to see if there is sufficient information for the Biophys J paper or if we should have done better. Other people have already successfully built upon the 2014 (PLOS) paper using our code; see e.g., https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.97.012408 and https://doi.org/10.1101/701037).