dsa110-pol

DSA-110 polarization utilities

Authors: Myles Sherman, Liam Connor, Casey Law, Vikram Ravi, Jakob Faber, Dana Simard

Last Upated: 2024-08-04

This library contains functions for polarization analysis of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) and the implementation of the DSA-110 Polarization Analysis and RM Synthesis Enabled for Calibration (PARSEC) analysis interface. Functions herein were designed for use with the DSA-110 file system and naming conventions, and therefore should be used with caution. This is particularly applicable to calibration functions; functions for interfacing with filterbank data should be portable to any system. The DSA-110 polarization pipeline which was built with this module is describe in detail in Sherman et al. 2024a (https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad275e).

Requirements

The following modules are required:

• numpy
• matplotlib
• pylab
• sigpyproc
• os
• sys
• pickle
• argparse

These can be installed by running:

pip install -r dsa-110-pol/requirements.txt

Alternatively, a copy of the conda environment used for development can be activated with:

conda activate dsa-110-pol/casa38dsapol

Quick Start

Clone dsa110-pol locally with:

git clone [email protected]:dsa110/dsa110-pol.git

Add the following lines to your .bashrc file to initialize environment variables:

export DSAPOLDIR="PATH-TO-DSA110-POL"/dsa110-pol
export DSA110DIR="PATH-TO-DSA110-CANDIDATES"/dsa-110
export DSAFRBDIR="PATH-TO-FRB-FILTERBANKS"/FRBdata/
export DSACALDIR="PATH-TO-POLARIZATION-CALIBRATOR-VOLTAGES"/polcal_voltages/

replacing with the paths specific to your machine. One additional environment variable, RMSYNTHTOKEN is required to push tqdm progress bars to slack for background RM synthesis processes. This is already defined on relevant DSA-110 machines; please submit an issue in this repository if this token is needed on any other machine.

Next install dsa110-pol with pip:

cd dsa110-pol
pip install .

This should have created the following directories within folder that encloses dsa110-pol:

• dsapol_logfiles
  • scat_files
  • RM_files
• dsapol_tables
• dsapol_polcal

along with logfiles for use by the PARSEC interface. dsapol_tables and dsapol_polcal must be populated with DSA-110-specific, proprietary data in order to use the polarization calibration functions and PARSEC directly. Please submit an issue requesting these files with details on your intended use of this data.

From a Python script, dsapol can be imported using:

$python
>>>from dsapol import dsapol

to use the user-facing functions. The other modules (as described below) are primarily for use by the PARSEC interface. PARSEC is a user interface used for baseband data analysis for DSA-110 FRBs. It is primarily designed for internal use; a brief tutorial for DSA-110 Team members is available at https://tinyurl.com/DSA110PARSECtutorial PARSEC can be accessed from https://code.deepsynoptic.org/, or, if the required data files are present, by running the following:

$cd interface
$mercury run PARSEC_Interface.ipynb

Modules

The following sub-modules are included:

• dsapol: Modules for polarization analysis with scripts and with the PARSEC interface.
  • dsapol
  • parsec
  • polcal
  • polbeamform
  • customfilplotfuncs
  • dedisp
  • filt
  • RMcal
  • scatscint
  • rmtablefuncs
  • budget
• dsapol96: TO DO: IMPLEMENT UPDATED MODULE FOR 96-ANTENNA ARRAY
• offline_beamforming: bash scripts used to beamform baseband voltage data using the toolkit cuda kernel developed by Vikram Ravi et al.
  • move_cal_voltages.bash
  • run_beamformer_offline_bfweightsupdate_cals_sb.bash
  • run_beamformer_visibs_bfweightsupdate_cals_sb.bash
  • run_beamformer_visibs_bfweightsupdate_sb.bash
• interface: High-level juypter notebook for PARSEC interface implemented with mercury (https://github.com/mljar/mercury)
  • PARSEC_Interface-InteractiveMercury-V4.ipynb
  • kill_mercury.sh
  • last_cal_metadata
  • IONEXdata
• scripts, tests: DEPRECATED, TO DO: REPLACE WITH UPDATED UNIT TESTS