PyCBC

PyCBC is a software package used to explore astrophysical sources of gravitational waves. It contains algorithms that can detect coalescing compact binaries and measure the astrophysical parameters of detected sources. PyCBC was used in the first direct detection of gravitational waves (GW150914) by LIGO and is used in the ongoing analysis of LIGO and Virgo data. If you use PyCBC in your scientific publications or projects, we ask that you acknowlege our work by citing the papers described on the page:

• Use of PyCBC in Scientific Publications

Getting Started

• Get the full PyCBC software suite with one of our Docker Images

  If you have Docker installed, you can get started using PyCBC with just two commands:

  pycbc — bash — 80x25

  $
  
  
  

  For more details, including instructions on starting a container that can display graphics, see:

  • Running PyCBC under Docker

• Use the PyCBC Library within your Browser

  Try out our tutorials.

Installation

Note, if you are a LIGO / Virgo member with access to LDG resources, PyCBC is already installed on your cluster through CVMFS! Instructions to source any release of PyCBC is available from the releases page.

You may also install PyCBC directly with pip. You may ommit lalsuite if you have your own build.

pip install lalsuite pycbc

Full detailed installation instructions which covers other installation cases:

• Installing PyCBC

Parameter Estimation of Gravitational-wave Sources

Users who want to create and run parameter estimation workflows should read the documentation at:

• PyCBC inference documentation (pycbc.inference)
  • Introduction
  • Sampling the parameter space (pycbc_inference)
  • Examples
  • Visualizing the Posteriors
  • Workflows
  • For Developers

Searching for Gravitational-wave Signals

Users who want to create and run scientific workflows to search for compact binaries should read the documentation in the links at:

• pycbc_make_psd_estimation_workflow: A workflow generator for noise estimation
• pycbc_make_coinc_search_workflow: A workflow to search for gravitational waves
• pycbc_make_offline_grb_workflow: A GRB triggered CBC analysis workflow generator

Template Banks, Hardware Injections, and more…

Users who are interested in tools that PyCBC provides for various other analysis tasks (e.g. template bank generation, hardware injections, and testing template banks) should read the documentation at:

• PyCBC template bank generation documentation (pycbc.tmpltbank)
• Hardware injection waveform generation
• Calculating the Effectualness (Fitting Factor) of Template Banks
• Dag Generator for Doing Faithfulness Comparisons
• Uploading triggers to gracedb

Extending PyCBC with external plugins

Would you like to use a waveform model that PyCBC doesn’t have? Or maybe you have your own waveform you’d like to use for a search, parameter estimation , etc. PyCBC supports a plug-in archictecture for external waveform models.

• Making new waveform approximants available to PyCBC

Library Examples and Interactive Tutorials

We have interactive tutorials and examples of using the pycbc. Please give them a try!.

In addition we have some examples below.

• Catalog of Observed Gravitational-wave Mergers
  • Which mergers do we have information about?
  • Plotting some key statistics from the catalog
  • Accessing data around each event
• Query times of valid data, hardware injections, and more.
  • Determine the times an instrument has valid data
  • Finding times of hardware injections
  • What flags can I query?
• Reading Gravitational-wave Frames
  • Introduction
  • Querying a LDR server
  • Reading a frame file
  • Writing a frame file
  • Method documentation
• Signal Processing with GW150914
  • Plotting the whitened strain
  • Calculate the signal-to-noise
  • Listen to GW150914 in Hanford
• Gravitational-wave Detectors
  • Detector Locations
  • Light travel time between detectors
  • Time source gravitational-wave passes through detector
  • Antenna Patterns and Projecting a Signal into the Detector Frame
• Handling PSDs
  • Reading / Saving a PSD from a file
  • Generating an Analytic PSD from lalsimulation
  • Estimating the PSD of a time series
• Generating Noise
  • Generating time domain Gaussian noise
• Waveforms
  • What waveforms can I generate?
  • Plotting Time Domain Waveforms
  • Generating one waveform in multiple detectors
  • Calculating the match between waveforms
  • Plotting a TD and FD waveform together in the TD
  • Plotting GW phase and amplitude of TD waveform
  • Plotting frequency evolution of TD waveform
• Filtering
  • Applying highpass / lowpass filters
  • Applying an FIR filter
  • Matched Filter SNR
  • Chisq time series
• Using PyCBC Distributions from PyCBC Inference
  • Making Mass Distributions in M1 and M2
  • Generating mchirp and q from uniform mass1 and mass2
  • Sky Location Distribution as Spin Distribution Example

Documentation for Developers

Documentation on building stand-alone bundled executables with PyInstaller is available at:

• Building Bundled Executables

PyCBC developers should read the pages below which explain how to write documentation, develop the code, and create releases:

• Documenting PyCBC code
• Creating Releases of PyCBC

Developers who are interested in file I/O, data storage, and access should read the documentation at:

• HDF files within the PyCBC workflow

Developers who are interested in creating new scientific workflow generation scripts should read the documentation at:

• Workflow: the inspiral analysis workflow generator (pycbc.workflow)

Full Module Documentation is available at:

• pycbc

Indexes and Tables

• Module Index
• Index