Copyright (C) 2006-2014 Christian Brinch.
Copyright (C) 2015-2017 the LIME development team.
LIME was created by Christian Brinch, but is now maintained by several people. See the LIME repository on GitHub for further details.
LIME is a 3D molecular excitation and radiation transfer code for far-infrared and (sub-)millimeter wavelength. LIME will calculate spectra of rotational transitions of atoms and molecules, given a user-supplied physical model. Details on the method can be found in C. Brinch and M. R. Hogerheijde, A&A 553, A25 (2010)
Any scientific publication making use of the LIME code should also reference this publication.
A comprehensive user manual is available online at the ReadTheDocs website.
The LIME code needs three library packages in order to compile: qhull, gsl, and cfitsio. If these are not already present on your system, you will need to install them.
The easiest way is to install MacPorts. After MacPorts has been installed, type in a terminal (as root or sudo)
$ port install qhull
$ port install cfitsio
$ port install gsl
Alternatively, the library packages may be installed with Fink. After Fink has been installed, type:
$ fink install qhull6.3.1-dev cfitsio gsl
If one or more of these packages is not present on your system, you can download the sources from the following locations. Make sure to get the latest versions.
The GNU scientific library (GSL), is present on most modern Unix and
Linux systems. Check for availability with gsl-config --libs. If
this command returns a library path, there is no need to download and
install it.
All three library packages are installed using the following
$ configure --prefix=/path/to/LimePackage
$ make
$ make install
In some cases the qhull library will produce a segmentation fault unless it is
compiled with the -fno-strict-aliasing flag. Note that the example here does not
require root privileges. Some modifications to the Makefile may be required if another
location is set for the installation.
Note for qhull2011.1 and later: This version of qhull will sometimes
not compile unless the -Wno-sign-conversion flag is removed from the
qhull Makefile. The naming of the qhull library has changed between
version 2010.1 and 2011.1. Make sure to edit the qhull flag near the
top of the LIME Makefile accordingly. Also, the newest versions of
qhull does not include a configure script.
LIME is automatically compiled at runtime so there is no installation
required. Do not try to make or make install LIME as this will produce an error.
We added a configure script with LIME version 1.9 to avoid the necessity to set extra environment variables or hack the Makefile etc. in order to deal with different names for cfitsio/qhull headers and libraries on different systems. You should run this script once after you install LIME on your machine, viz:
$ cd <LIME directory>
$ ./configure
Doing this generates a file Makefile.defs, without which LIME will not compile.
The path to the lime script needs to be in your PATH
environment variable. If you are using bash, do:
$ export PATH=/path/to/lime/:${PATH}
where /path/to/lime/ is the directory where the LIME source code
is located. If you are using csh, do:
$ setenv PATH /path/to/lime/:${PATH}
To find out whether you use bash or csh, do
$ echo $SHELL
The code runs simply by typing (for example)
$ cd example/
$ lime model.c
The model file can have any name. The model file need not be written in C. Subroutines can also be written in Fortran (or other languages that can be linked with C, e.g., python) as long as the names comply with the standards of linking C and Fortran. See this page for information on how to link C and Fortran. If Fortran subroutines are used, the linking of LIME needs to be done with the Fortran compiler. Modify the Makefile accordingly.
Note that with version 1.9, a model file can be written in python; however to use this you will need to compile LIME specially. Go to the LIME parent directory and type
$ make pylime
This generates an executable named pylime. You run this with your python module as (for example)
$ cd example
$ ../pylime model.py
