LEGWORK is a python package that does the LEGWORK for you
by evolving binaries, calculating gravitational-wave strains, computing signal-to-noise
ratios for binary systems potentially observable with LISA and visualising the results
My co-authors (Katie
Breivik
and Selma de Mink) and I have officially
released
LEGWORK
and you can now read the paper on the ArXiv! This
package was dreamt up
almost entirely independently by both me and Katie, and when we realised that we had the
same
idea we decided to work together to create this package!
Our motivation behind LEGWORK
was to create a package that was completely
open-source, since this would (1) allow seasoned experts to collaborate and suggest new
features or improvements and (2) make it easier for newcomers to quickly understand how
to make their own predictions. Another motivation was that, by introducing
this package to the community, we could create a collaborative code to avoid
individual mistakes. We found that many papers have slightly different pre-factors in
their equations, which could lead to very different predictions, so we aim for
LEGWORK
to provide a central tool and reference for the community to use in
order to avoid this confusion.
The installation of the package should be very simple. Just run
pip install legwork
and you're all set! If you have any installation issues you can check out the full
instructions
here.
LEGWORK
can be used to evolve the orbits of binaries, calculating their
gravitational-wave strains, compute their signal-to-noise ratios and visualise the
results! I encourage you to check out all of the tutorials, demos and documentation
here. Below I've included some plots that demonstrate the sorts of things you could make
with LEGWORK
. The plot on the left illustrates how eccentricity can affect
the detectability of a binary - some eccentricity can be good for increasing your SNR,
but too much can move the GW emission into an area of the sensitivity curve to which
LISA is less sensitive! The plot on the right shows the horizon distance for circular
binaries over different frequencies and eccentricities. For more information about these
plots I encourage you to read the "Use Cases" section of the release paper, in which we
discuss them in detail!