matteobachetti / hexp-pulsar-population

hexp-pulsar-population

Requirements

The user needs to have SIXTE, SIMPUT, and HEASOFT installed and working.

Moreover, they need to have an up-to date version of response files and SIXTE configurations for HEX-P and any other instrument they want to simulate.

Finally, they need some sort of source catalog and, possibly, a FITS image with valid WCS containing the diffuse emission from the host galaxy or, when relevant, the interstellar medium, and its spectrum in a valid Xspec .xcm file.

Usage

This repository contains two Python scripts and two example Bash scripts:

• sixte_population.py: this produces a SIMPUT file containing many sources. Each of the sources is split into two:

  1. A thermal spectrum (diskpbb in Xspec), optionally with aperiodical variability (a complicated PDS with various Lorentzian components)
  2. A hard cutoff spectrum, pulsed. Pulsations have random pulsed fractions (from 0 to 100%), and the pulse profile is a Von Mises profile with $\kappa$ parameter ranging from 1 to 20.

  Launch with

  $ python sixte_population.py catalog_file.fits output_file.simput diffuse_emission_image.img diffuse_emission_spectrum.xcm 9.6e-12
  

  where 9.6e-12 is the flux of the diffuse emission in this case.

• run_sim_hexp.bash executes the simulation, using reasonable defaults. Launch with (e.g. a 100 ks observation)

  $ bash run_sim_hexp.bash output_file.simput 100000
  

  creates files named like output_file_let_evt.fits, output_file_het_1_evt.fits, output_file_het_2_evt.fits

• time_source_from_sixte.py reads the simulation, the SIMPUT catalog, and calculates the H test of all the pulsars to test whether they are detected. Launch with, e.g., for a 5 arcsecond extraction region,

  $ python time_source_from_sixte.py output_file.simput output_file_het_1_evt.fits 5
  

  This produces, for each pulsar, a folded pulsar profile and an HDF5 file containing the data of the pulse profile (can be read with an astropy Table as table=Table.read("file.hdf5"))