PyCBC: Python Software to Study Gravitational Waves

PyCBC is software developed by a collaboration of LIGO, Virgo, and independent scientists. It is open source and freely available. We use PyCBC in the detection of gravitational waves from binary mergers such as GW150914. These examples explore how to analyze gravitational wave data, how we find potential signals, and learn about them.

These notebooks are available to view, download, or run in interactive sessions.

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Gravitational-wave Data Analysis

Tutorial 1: Accessing Gravitational-wave data

Tutorial 2: Data visualization and basic signal processing

Tutorial 3: Matched filtering to identify signals

Tutorial 4: Signal Consistency and Basic Significance Testing

Gravitational-wave Inference

Many of these tutorials will require you to make edits to config files as part of their exercises. At the moment this isn't easy to do on services like google colab. However, you can do them either on your local machine or by using services such as mybinder or sciserver which allow a full juypterhub experience with the ability to view and edit text files. Below we give links to the tutorials which should directly work in google colab, however.

Tutorial 0: Overview (this is a summary of inference tutorials 1-6; meant for a shorter tutorial session)

See video presentation of Tutorial 0 by Collin Capano

Tutorial 1: Models (likelihood function you are trying to sample + priors) and Samplers by Hand

Tutorial 5: Results files and Plotting

Tutorial 7: Adding Custom Waveforms to PyCBC

Tutorial 8: Black hole ringdown analysis with PyCBC

Tutorial 9: Adding custom models to PyCBC (e.g. alternate likelihoods, GRB / Kilonova models, etc.)

Some things that you may learn

• How to access LIGO data
• How to do some basic signal processing
• Data visualization of LIGO data in time-frequency plots
• Matched filtering to extract a known signal

Other ways to run in the browser