Software

Software

I am involved in a number of different open-source software activities as part of my research. These include:

Reltrans

reltrans is a numerical model that models the X-ray emission and variability from accretion material around black holes. In particular, reltrans models the expected spectral timing signals known as X-ray reverberation which allows for the measuring of black hole mass and distance. Read more at https://reltransdocs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ and download the model at https://github.com/reltrans/reltrans. I am one of the maintainers of reltrans as well as the lead developer of the implementation of emulators within the model, implemented as end-to-end approximators as well as modular implementation of approximations of key computationally expensive calculations within the code.

XRImulator

XRImulator is an instrument and model simulator for X-ray interferometry, which we see as the future of X-ray astronomy. X-ray interferometry will allow us to take images in X-ray and distinguish objects as close as nano-arc-seconds apart on the sky. I lead the model simulation portion of the code, orientated around producing model images of what we expect to see, both in terms of toy models as well as more in-depth and rigorous simulations of black holes. Read more and download the code at https://github.com/X-ray-interferometry/XRImulator.

nDspec

nDspec is an open-source Python library that provides tools for X-ray spectral timing analysis (and beyond) that links together modern Python statistics libraries to older implementations of X-ray analysis software that are widely used in X-ray astronomy such as xspec. I particularly contribute statistical expertise to the package through the creation of tools to assist rigorous statistical analysis of models and data as well as implement more general features such as joint inference. Read more and download the package at https://github.com/matteolucchini1/nDspec.