Overview

schNell is a very lightweight python module that can be used to compute basic map-level noise properties for generic networks of gravitational wave interferometers. This includes primarily the noise power spectrum \(N_{\ell}\), but also other things, such as antenna patterns, overlap functions, inverse variance maps etc.

_images/Nell.png

schNell is composed of three main classes:

  • Detectors. These contain information about each individual detector of the network (their positions, noise properties, orientation etc.).
  • NoiseCorrelations. These describe the noise-level correlation between pairs of detectors.
  • MapCalculators. These objects combine a list of Detectors into a network (potentially together with a NoiseCorrelation object) and compute the corresponding map-level noise properties arising from their correlations.

A quick but thorough description of how these three classes can be used to compute different quantities can be found in here.

_images/antenna.png

Installation

Installing schNell should be as simple as typing:

pip install schnell [--user]

where the –user flag will only be necessary if you don’t have admin privileges.