NANOGrav Noise Model Selection Code Bank

Code bank and tutorials for NANOGrav noise model selection.

Software Dependencies

The notebooks herein are dependent on the pulsar timing array data analysis suite enterprise and the software package enterprise_extensions containing a number of scripts and models useful for PTA analysis. This Dropbox Paper contains information for installing this software.

In addition to the post processing functions available in enterprise_extensions the plotting functions available in la_forge will be used in these notebooks.

Pulsar Timing Array Data Analysis

For those new to pulsar timing array data analysis there are a number of repositories of workshop materials and tutorials available.

The NANOGrav Pulsar Timing School repository contains a number of activities and a comprehensive literature review of various gravitational wave data analysis papers.

The International Pulsar Timing Array GW Tutorials repository has a number extensive tutorials for using enterprise and enterprise_extensions. There is also a tutorial for using libstempo, a Python wrapper for the pulsar timing software TEMPO2.

## Noise Model Notes There are a number of different kernels we use to model the time-correlated noise in our pulsars. This pdf discusses the ones currently supported by enterprise_extensions.

Users Guide

In order to facilitate the sharing of changes to this software the following we make the following suggestions:

After cloning the repo to your local machine, change directories and make a branch of the repository with YOURINITIALS-working:

git clone https://github.com/Hazboun6/nanograv_noise_model_selection.git
cd nanograv_noise_model_selection
git checkout -b jsh-working

This will allow more control when trying to make pull requests for changing the code. Please keep chains out of the repository. This can be done by setting the outdir to a different directory, or instead if you can set chains/ as the outmost directory for any sampling chains, as the .gitignore will ignore all files in that directory.