Simulate the future of gravitational-wave detection in space
Synthetic LISA is released under the Caltech and MIT public-domain licenses. ITAR clearance for the public release of Synthetic LISA was received on 4/15/2005 (thanks to John Armstrong's hard work).
Synthetic LISA will be perpetually beta software. In particular, the manual is incomplete, and some experimental features may be partially sketched out. Still, I encourage you to experiment with it. Please file issues and requests on GitHub.
Developed by Michele Vallisneri at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in collaboration with John Armstrong, Synthetic LISA is an open-source software package to simulate the LISA science process at the level of scientific and technical requirements.
Synthetic LISA generates synthetic time series of the LISA fundamental noises, as filtered through all the TDI observables; it provides a streamlined module to compute the TDI responses to gravitational waves, according to a full model of TDI (including the motion of the LISA array, and the temporal and directional dependence of the armlengths).
Synthetic LISA is written as a C++/Python modular package that allows adding code for specific gravitational-wave sources, or for new noise models; time series for waves and noises can also be easily loaded from disk or memory. The package has a Python interface for easy interactive steering and scripting, and contains several documented example scripts.
Synthetic LISA is used extensively in the Mock LISA Data Challenges to generate challenge datasets. The architecture of the MLDC lisatools software suite is also heavily based on Synthetic LISA.
In Jun 2004, Synthetic LISA received an ICB Space Act Award and in Aug 2005 it was listed in NASA Tech Brief.
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© M. Vallisneri 2014 — last modified on 2012/05/15