Conduct Fast Radio Burst Population Synthesis | David Gardenier | ASTRON

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, frbpoppy continues the work of psrpop and psrpoppy in the realm of FRBs.

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

2. Get the files from the github repository: :

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

3. 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

4. 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, the tests directory, or else frbpoppy's webpage!

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

• bokeh >= 1.3.4 for interactive plotting
• numpy >= 1.17.0 for array calculations
• pandas >= 0.23.4 for interactive plotting and easy import of csvs
• scipy >= 1.1.0 for Bessel functions and integrations
• SQLAlchemy >= 1.3.0 for creating and querying cosmological databases
• matplotlib >= 2.2.3,<3.1 for plotting
• requests >= 2.20.0. for downloading new versions of frbcat
• tqdm >= 4.35.0 for nice progress bars during long calculations
• joblib >= 0.13.2 for parallel processing of long calculations

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

• future-fstrings >= 1.2.0 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 me directly. Any help is appreciated!

• David Gardenier

  As a PhD student at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) and the University of Amsterdam (UvA), I'm working with the APERTIF/ALERT team to establish the properties of FRBs. Get in touch with me via email, drop past my office or say hello at any FRB conferences!

Check out frbpoppy's webpage for more information!