Gravitational waves¶

kuibit has a large number of features to work with gravitational (and electromagnetic) waves as extracted with the Newman-Penrose formalism. Most of these features are inherited from other objects: multipoles and timeseries, as gravitational waves are typically studied in a multipolar decomposition and they are functions evolving with time. For this reason, you should familiarize yourself with the objects in kuibit that represent those quantities: Time and frequency series and Working with multipolar decompositions.

The main two objects to work with gravitational waves are GravitationalWavesOneDet and GravitationalWavesDir. The first described waves as seen by one specific detector (fixed radius), the second collects GravitationalWavesOneDet for all the available detectors. These classes inherit several features from the base version in the cactus_multipoles module (Reference on kuibit.cactus_waves).

Note

While this page is devoted to gravitational waves, electromagnetic waves are implemented in a similar way. It is important to understand what kind of electromagnetic waves we are considering here: those that are extracted with the Newman-Penrose formalism. Most people will not deal with this kind of electromagnetic waves. An example of electromagnetic waves of this kind can be extracted with the Proca thorns.

Accessing gravitational-wave data¶

Most of the interesting functions related to gravitational waves (with exception of the extrapolation to infinity) are for a fixed extraction radius. Hence, they live in the class GravitationalWavesOneDet. This object contains all the available multipoles for Psi4 at a fixed radius.

A typical workflow starts from a SimDir:

sd = SimDir("gw150914")
gws = sd.gws
gw_r100 = gws[100]  # This is a GravitationalWavesOneDet


gw_r100 contains all the information on Psi4 at radius 100. There are multiple ways to get the actual timeseries for a specific monopole. For instance psi4_22 = gw_r100[(2, 2)].

The more interesting quantity is the gravitational-wave strain. To access this for a specific multipole, use the method get_strain_lm().

Strain¶

The method get_strain_lm() return the strain for the multipolar component (l, m) multiplied to the extraction distance. This is done via double-time integration using the method of the fixed-frequency in Fourier space. The fixed-frequency integration reduces drifts in the mean value of the strain.

This function requires some care to be produce meaningful results.

First, to avoid aliasing and spectral leakage, the timeseries must go to zero at the boundaries of the interval. If the physical signal does not have this property, a window function must be applied. This can be done directly with get_strain_lm() providing the argument window_function.

If window_function is None, no window is applied. Alternatively, one can apply one the windows already defined in the timeseries module. To do this, just pass a string with the name of the window. You can find these names looking at the methods in TimeSeries and finding those that end with windowed: the first part of the name is what you have to pass (e.g., tukey). Alternatively, you can pass a function that takes as first argument the length of the data and returns an array with the window (this is how windows in SciPy are implemented). In both cases, if the window requires additional parameters, you can pass them providing them directly to get_strain_lm().

Second, you must provide a pcut parameter. This is required by the fixed-frequency integration method. pcut is typically chosen as the longest physical period in the signal (or the shortest frequency). In the case of a binary inspiral, this is approximately the period of the first half orbit. The fixed-frequency integration suppresses smaller frequencies signals.

Finally, because of the windowing and the integration, signals around the boundaries is not too reliable. It is removed by default. You can opt-out setting trim_ends to False.

In case you are interested in summing up all multipole monopoles, you should use the more general function get_strain(). This function takes input similar to get_strain_lm(), and requires to specify an evaluation angle (theta, phi). In case you want to sum up only up to a given $$l$$, pass the argument l_max.

Similarly, you can compute what would be the gravitational wave strain observed by the LIGO-Virgo interferometers using get_observed_strain() and providing a sky localization. This method computes the strain and convolves it with the antenna responses $$F$$ of the single detectors:

$h = F_\times h_\times(\theta_{\mathrm{GW}}, \phi_{\mathrm{GW}}) + F_+ h_+(\theta_{\mathrm{GW}}, \phi_{\mathrm{GW}})$

Here, $$\theta_{\mathrm{GW}}$$ and $$\phi_{\mathrm{GW}}$$ are the spherical coordinates of the observer from the binary’s frame, taking the angular momentum of the binary to point along the z-axis. This function does not add noise.

Extrapolate_to_infinity¶

The function extrapolate_strain_lm_to_infinity() can be used to extrapolate gravitational waves strain to spatial infinity. This is done fitting polynomials to wavefronts that are aligned in retarded times (assuming a background Schwarzschild spacetime). The most important paramter that this function takes is the list of distances that you want to use for the extrapolation. These have to be distances at which you have detectors. You can find all the available distances with the keys() method.

For improved stability, you can extrapolate the waves as amplitude and phase (instead of real and imaginary parts). To do this, provide the extrapolate_amplitude_phase=True option.

TODO

Expand this section.

Warning

This function has not been thorougly tested!

Energy and angular momentum¶

GravitationalWavesOneDet (and ElectromagneticWavesOneDet) implements methods to compute the instantaneous power and torque along the z axis. To compute these quantities for a specific mode, just use get_power_lm() or get_torque_z_lm(). You can also compute these quantities for all the available multipoles up to a given l_max using the methods get_total_power() or () The integrated (cumulative) versions are also available. These are the energy and angular momentum in gravitational waves. The methods have similar names with energy instead of power and angular_momentum instead of torque_z.