Fast Radio Burst Population Synthesis | David Gardenier, Joeri van Leeuwen & Yuyang Wang | ASTRON & UvA

Establishing the origin and properties of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) is one of the biggest goals in radio astronomy. frbpoppy was called into life to help astronomers determine which FRB properties to expect. Designed to be simple in use and easy to adapt.

1. Determine if you can and want to install frbpoppy system wide (e.g. with sudo). Otherwise, first create and enter a virtual environment in python with e.g.:

   $ python3 -m venv <foo>      # where <foo> is the install directory, e.g. ~/frbpoppy/virtualenv
   $ source <foo>/bin/activate  # where <foo> is the same directory as above
   

2. Ensure gfortran is installed on your system (used for NE2001).

3. Get the files from the github repository:

   $ git clone https://github.com/TRASAL/frbpoppy
   

4. It's important that frbpoppy is installed locally. Why? It means that you can play around with the code without having to dig into a system wide install. It also allows frbpoppy to create data files more easily. Ubuntu is supported, as should be Macs, however no tests have been done on Windows. Install frbpoppy locally by going to the downloaded directory and running

   $ python3 setup.py develop
   

5. Run frbpoppy for the first time. Frbpoppy will automatically create lookup tables for complex calculations. Note this can take up to 2h on a modern machine (4 cores). Subsequent runs will be orders of magnitude faster.

   $ python3 examples/_starting_with_frbpoppy_.py
   

Check out the examples directory or the tests directory.

All requirements can be found in setup.py but are also expanded upon in the following list:

• bokeh for interactive plotting
• numpy for array calculations
• pandas for interactive plotting and easy import of csvs
• frbcat for importing frbcat data
• scipy for Bessel functions and integrations
• SQLAlchemy for creating and querying cosmological databases
• matplotlib for plotting
• requests for downloading new versions of frbcat
• dill for saving populations in pickled files
• tqdm for nice progress bars during long calculations
• joblib for parallel processing of long calculations

And if using an old version of Python (<v3.6):

• future-fstrings for using f-strings in old Python versions

Spotted a bug, or want to add some functionality? Simply open an issue on github, or contact Joeri van Leeuwen or Yuyang Wang directly. Any help is appreciated!

• David Gardenier

  During his PhD, David worked at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) and the University of Amsterdam (UvA), with the APERTIF/ALERT team, to establish the properties of FRBs. He wrote frbpoppy. He works in industry now, drop him a line through his webpage if you enjoy working with frbpoppy.

• Yuyang Wang

  Yuyang currently pursues a PhD at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON). His research focuses on FRB population studies and pulsar timing. Get in touch with him via email.

• Joeri van Leeuwen

  Joeri is a faculty member at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) and conceived frbpoppy. Email him or talk to him at a conference.