PSRPOP .... pulsar population modelling programs

PSRPOP is a package developed to model the Galactic population and evolution of radio pulsars. It is a collection of modules unashamadly written in Fortran77 for an analysis of a large sample of pulsars detected by the Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey (Lorimer et al. 2006) and is now freely available to others wishing to investigate the results of that work and for further analysis.

Main programs

  • populate - creates a model Galaxy of pulsars distributed according according to various assumptions.
  • survey - searches the model galaxies generated using populate using realistic models of pulsar surveys.
  • visualize - a Tk/PGPLOT script to plot various aspects of model detected pulsars from survey.

    An example screenshot from visualize can be found here.

    Documentation and example usage

    Each program is driven by flexible command-line switches, from which it is possible to build up a multitude of tasks. For example, to populate a model galaxy with pulsars until 1000 are detected by the Parkes multibeam survey, would require something along the following lines:

    populate -n 1000 -d 0 -e 0.1 PMSURV

    To subsequently search a population with a selection of model pulsar surveys, one would invoke

    search psrpop.model PMSURV SWINMB1 SWINMB2

    On-line help can be found by typing the name of each program. Detailed information and example usage can be found here.

    Installing PSRPOP

    Download the latest version of PSRPOP here and unpack the gzip-compressed tar file via the command:

    gunzip -c psrpop-2.1.tar.gz | tar xvf -

    This will place the source code into a psrpop-2.1 directory. Go into this directory and run the configuration script:

    cd psrpop-2.1
    ./configure

    and specify the location of the directory for the executable files when prompted.

    Once the script has run, type "make" and hopefully the compilation will proceed seamlessly!

    This page was last updated on June 2, 2008 by dunc_lorimer at sourceforge dot net