Welcome to OPTIMUS!
This webpage is dedicated to the development of OPTIMUS, an analysis environment for spectroscopic time-resolved data.
The motivation for developing OPTIMUS was to conceive a tool that is capable of promptly executing a variety of analysis strategies and thus allowing the researchers to focus on exploring different hypotheses rather than to struggle with analysis difficulties of technical nature. In OPTIMUS are implemented Global Lifetime Analysis (GLA), Global Target Analysis (GTA), Lifetime Density Analysis (LDA), as wells as a number of procedures treating artifacts common in ultrafast spectroscopy, such as time-zero dispersion, coherent artifact, etc. The module OPTIMUS-GLA is available as a standalone application with an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) for free download. At present GTA and LDA are command line based; however, standalone applications with dedicated GUIs for the latter modules are also planned to be released in the future.
A detailed description of the methods implemented in OPTIMUS and the structure of the program have been recently published:
Implementation and evaluation of data analysis strategies for time-resolved optical spectroscopy
Chavdar Slavov, Helvi Hartmann, Josef Wachtveitl, Analytical Chemistry, DOI: 10.1021/ac504348h
A little bit of history
OPTIMUS evolved from a small side project that I started in the group of Prof. Wachtveitl (Geothe University, Frankfurt) together with Helvi Hartmann, one my former master students. We quickly managed to implement the basic analysis algorithms, but the construction of a unified, reliable data analysis environment was a bit more challenging. Nevertheless, the promising initial results motivated me to invest more of my time in the project. The efforts resulted in the development of OPTIMUS, which is now commonly adopted for data analysis in our groups and I hope that it will find even broader audience by bringing it as a freeware to the scientific community.
Acknowledgments
A number of people have contributed to the development of OPTIMUS. Peter Eberhardt participated in the implementation of the coherent artifact analysis for ultrafast transient absorption spectroscopy. Dr. Markus Braun contributed with insightful discussions, which were very helpful for the fine tuning of OPTIMUS. In addition, many colleagues, like Andreas Reus, Elias Eckert, Felix Schweighöfer, Lars Dworak, Peter Trojanowski, and others, contributed with suggestions for different features as wells as by program testing.
Personal thank you note
The development of OPTIMUS is the evolution of my long-standing interest in the field of data analysis and kinetic modelling. This interest started during my master studies in the group of Prof. Vasilij Goltsev (Department of Biophysics, Biological Faculty, Sofia University) and fired up during my PhD work in the group of Prof. Alfred Holzwarth (MPI Chemical Energy Conversion, former Bioinorganic Chemistry), where I had the great chance to work and communicate with Dr. Malwina Szczepaniak, Dr. Evgeny Ostroumov and Dr. Marc Müller. All of those people played a very important role in the shaping of my ideas of how to build a data analysis environment for which I am very grateful.
Chavdar Slavov, 08.01.2015