PyCBC: Powering Gravitational-wave Astronomy

PyCBC is the result of a community effort to build a set of core libraries and application suites used to study gravitational-wave data and astrophysics. It contains algorithms that can detect coalescing compact binaries and measure the astrophysical parameters of detected sources. PyCBC was used in the first direct detection of gravitational waves (GW150914) by LIGO and is used in the ongoing analysis of LIGO and Virgo data.

If you are interesting in building community tools for gravitational-wave astronomy, please consider contributing, whether it is providing feedback, examples, documentation or helping to improve the core library and application suite.

Core Library Examples

The core library provides the tools to do GW data analysis. See examples of how to use PyCBC core tools to read gravitational-wave data, query detector status, filter data, generate waveforms, estimate PSDs, calculate SNRs, and much more.

PyCBC Inference

Easy-to-use, configurable, and robust Parameter Estimation for Gravitational-wave Astronomy and Multi-messenger analysis.

Detect Signals in Archival Data

The deep analysis used to detect gravitational-wave sources in archival data.

Detect Signals in association with GRBs

Targeted analysis to detect gravitational-wave sources in association with gamma-ray bursts and other transient sources.

Other applications

Documentation for a select sample of the pycbc software suite. These include for generating template banks, hardware injections, etc.

Getting Started

Installation

You may also install PyCBC directly with pip or conda.

pip install pycbc

Detailed instructions are found here.

Note, if you are a LIGO / Virgo member with access to IGWN resources, PyCBC is already installed on your cluster through CVMFS! Instructions to source any release of PyCBC is available from the releases page.