SIMION 8.0 Issues/Bugs/Enhancements

Issue I452.3 [enhancement,prog,81,resolved]
  New ion_effective_charge reserved variable.

  The ion_charge variable contains the per-particle charge in
  elementary charge units.  However, when charge repulsion features
  are used (Beam, Coulombic, or Factor repulsion), each traced
  particle can represent more than one real particle (possibly
  millions).  The precise number is controlled by the global charge
  repulsion amount on the Particles tab (or the sim_repulsion_amount
  variable -- Issue I452.2) and the charge-weighting-factors on the
  individual particles (or the ion_cwf -- Issue I452).  The ion_charge
  variable does not take any of this into account.

  As of 8.0.5-TEST20, a new ion_effective_charge variable is
  available.  This value contains the real charge represented by the
  particle.

  When Coulombic or Factor repulsion is used, each particle traced
  represents a point (or cloud) of charges, and ion_effective_charge
  represents the total charge (in elementary charge units) of that
  point.

  When Beam repulsion is used, each particle trajectory instead
  represents a current (in A).  That is a density of charge B<per>
  time or distance traveled, so it's not as clear how to define
  ion_effective_charge.  We choose ion_effective_charge to represent
  the charge (in elementary charge units) in the current time-step.
  Current (in A) can be obtained by 1E+6 * 1.6021773349E-19 *
  ion_effective_charge / ion_time_step.  (In the initialize segment,
  ion_time_step is not defined; but you can treat it as 1 microsecond
  in the above formula.)

  ion_effective_charge can be read anywhere ion_charge can be read.
  It is not writable.

  Added in 8.1 early access mode (8.0.5-TEST20).