The time-of-arrival of a neutron at the detector is commonly named time-of-flight or tof.
This name is however misleading because it is not necessarily the time the neutron spent in-flight,
since that also depends on the birth time of the neutron.
Only the arrival time is known at a neutron beamline,
and there is thus an inherent uncertainty in the birth time as neutrons can originate from any part of the pulse.
This is especially true at long-pulse neutron sources such as ESS.
We rename tof to toa in this PR to remove confusion around the definition of time-of-flight.
We keep the tofs properties and tof coordinate, and add deprecation warnings when they are accessed.
The time-of-arrival of a neutron at the detector is commonly named time-of-flight or
tof.This name is however misleading because it is not necessarily the time the neutron spent in-flight, since that also depends on the birth time of the neutron.
Only the arrival time is known at a neutron beamline, and there is thus an inherent uncertainty in the birth time as neutrons can originate from any part of the pulse. This is especially true at long-pulse neutron sources such as ESS.
We rename
toftotoain this PR to remove confusion around the definition of time-of-flight. We keep thetofsproperties andtofcoordinate, and add deprecation warnings when they are accessed.