CHANGELOG.md

Change Log

Future (To-Do)

• General
  • Add fit/interpolated GW spectra from Chen19 into SAM modules.
• Structures for comprehensive binary evolution / hardening modules
  • a class-based structure allowing for modular hardening processes to be added/removed/modified easily.
  • structures allowing for storing host-galaxy information (e.g. based on semi-analytic models, Illustris, observations, etc) that can be used for hardening calculations
  • accretion rate models based on semi-analytic models, Illustris, observations, etc
• Explicit evolution/hardening models for
  • dynamical friction
  • stellar scattering using uniform/standard stellar distributions (e.g. isotropic & isothermal)
  • comprehensive stellar scattering using arbitrary stellar distributions
  • circumbinary accretion mediated hardening ( inward-migration)
  • circumbinary accretion mediated softening (outward-migration)
  • eccentric binary evolution
  • triple MBH interactions
• Comparisons with observations (particularly EM) to calibrate sythesized populations
  • accurate catalogs of 'direct' MBH mass measurements from the local universe
  • approximate catalogs of 'indirect' MBH mass measurements from populations of AGN/quasars
  • MBH--host-galaxy scaling relationships
  • AGN/Quasar luminosity functions
  • constraints on kpc--Mpc scale galaxy and AGN mergers
  • constraints on sub-kpc separation binary AGN based on EM candidates (and upper-limits)
• Gaussian Processes
  • How significant are deviations in predicted spectra from Gaussians? What produces those deviations, are they single (or single-like) sources, or are they actual "population" trends? (Former is okay to ignore, latter is not!)
  • [ ]
• Testing
  • Add sphinx docs build to github action for testing

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Current

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Past

v0.2 - 2022/03/28

• Binary Evolution (evolution.py)
  • Now tracking hardening rates in evolution.
  • Simple implementation of some binary hardening models, both physical and phenomenological (i.e. power-law like).
  • Modules for Dynamical Friction, Stellar Scattering, and GW hardening.
• Logistical and Internals
  • Added submodule for logging (log.py)
  • Added submodule for plotting (plot.py)
  • Added submodule for observational data and relations (observations.py)
  • New, and also improvements to old, notebooks for testing and demonstration purposes. Addition of more unit tests and test scripts.
  • Extensive additions to utility / mathematical / numerical functions (utils.py).
  • Improved README.md, and started adding basics to holodeck paper manuscript.
• Populations
  • Cleaned up of observationally-based populations (pop_observational.py)
  • Unified implementation of MBH-galaxy relationships (relations.py)
  • Significant cleanup and upgrades in Semi-Analytic Models based populations (sam.py)
    • Developed methodology for sampling discrete binaries from continuous distributions (in coordination with kalepy modules)

v0.1 - 2021/08/15

• Basic GW spectra can be generated using simple versions of population synthesis based on:
  • A finite, discrete population of binaries from the Illustris simulations
  • Continuous distributions from semi-analytic modeling
  • Continuous distributions from semi-analytic modeling, with Illustris merger rates, calibrated to local galaxy observations.
• A class-based implementation is used in a way to facilitate subclassing (i.e. extensibility).
• Only the simplest models for binary evolution (i.e. fixed time-delays and GW emission) are currently included.
• Continuous population distributions can be easily interfaced with the kalepy package to facilitate discrete sampling. Even without formal discrete sampling, proper GW (foreground and background) statistics can be approximated.
• Cosmology class (subclass of astropy.cosomology) providing convenience functions and more rapid calculations on arrays (via interpolation).