RM-Tools

RM-synthesis, RM-clean and QU-fitting on polarised radio spectra

Python scripts to perform RM-synthesis, RM-clean and QU-fitting on polarised radio spectra.

Initial version by Cormac R. Purcell Currently hosted by CIRADA and maintained by Cameron Van Eck

Version 1.2 is now released! Check the wiki for new functionality.

Installation / Usage

Installation, usage instructions and detailed algorithm information can be found in the wiki.

Structure:

• RMtools_1D ... Toolkit to produce Faraday spectra of single pixels.
• RMtools_3D ... Toolkit to produce Faraday depth cubes.
• RMutils ... Utilities for interacting with polarized data and Faraday depth

Five terminal commands are added to invoke the main tools:

• rmsynth1d
• rmclean1d
• rmsynth3d
• rmclean3d
• qufit

Use these commands with a -h flag to get information on the usage of each. Full documentation is on the wiki.

The following terminal commands are available to access the additional tools:

• rmtools_freqfile
• rmtools_calcRMSF
• rmtools_testdata1D
• rmtools_createchunks
• rmtools_assemblechunks
• rmtools_fitIcube
• rmtools_peakfitcube
• rmtools_testdata3D
• rmtools_extractregion

Citing

If you use this package in a publication, please cite the ASCL entry for the time being. A paper with a full description of the package is being prepared but is not available yet.

More information on the Canadian Initiative for Radio Astronomy Data Analysis (CIRADA) can be found at cirada.ca.

RM-Tools is open source under an MIT License.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Questions, bug reports, and feature requests can be posted to the GitHub issues page or sent to Cameron Van Eck, cameron.vaneck (at) anu.edu.au.

The development dependencies can be installed via pip from PyPI:

pip install "RM-Tools[dev]"

or for a local clone:

cd RM-Tools
pip install ".[dev]"

Code formatting and style is handled by black and isort, with tests run by pytest. A pre-commit hook is available to handle the autoformatting. After installing the dev dependencies, you can install the hooks by running:

cd RM-Tools
pre-commit install