tabletop_pta

Python Package to do Time of Arrival calculations for a Pulsar Timing Array demonstration with metronomes.

• Free software: MIT license
• Documentation: https://tabletop-pta.readthedocs.io.

Installation

Before installing the tabletop_pta demonstration software one should install the audio software needed by tabletop_pta to record and playback the metronome pulses. This includes PyAudio and the PortAudio c-libraries it is based on.

PyAudio: https://people.csail.mit.edu/hubert/pyaudio/ (And PortAudio Libraries)

Note: That the PortAudio libraries are not installed when PyAudio (which depends on PortAUdio) is installed. You must follow the instructions found in the link above to install PortAudio.

Once PortAudio and PyAudio are installed you can install the tabletop_pta package with a simple call to pip:

pip install tabletop_pta

Alternatively, one can install directly from the downloaded GitHub files. First clone the repository.

git clone https://github.com/nanograv/tabletop_pta.git

Then go into the tabletop_pta directory and run

python setup.py install

Publication

This work is featured in a publication, currently released on the ArXiv. If you would like to reference this work please use the following attribution:

@article{Lam:2018wbx,
      author         = "Lam, Michael T. and Romano, Joseph D. and Key, Joey S.
                        and Normandin, Marc and Hazboun, Jeffrey S.",
      title          = "{An Acoustical Analogue of a Galactic-scale
                        Gravitational-Wave Detector}",
      year           = "2018",
      eprint         = "1803.05285",
      archivePrefix  = "arXiv",
      primaryClass   = "physics.ed-ph",
      SLACcitation   = "%%CITATION = ARXIV:1803.05285;%%"
}

Features

This software runs a set of Python scripts for finding the arrival time of metronome ticks.

One may use the various functions while running Python or use one of two graphical user interfaces called with the commands:

PTAdemo_single_metronome

PTAdemo_double_metronome

Credits

This package was created with Cookiecutter and the audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage project template.