Talk Proposal: LEGWORK

[TomWagg]

Name of software library or topic

LEGWORK (LISA Evolution and Gravitational Wave ORbit Kit)

URL to software repository

Code: https://github.com/TeamLEGWORK/LEGWORK
Docs: https://legwork.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Name of person who will give the talk

Tom Wagg

Brief abstract

We present LEGWORK (LISA Evolution and Gravitational Wave Orbit Kit), an open-source Python package for making predictions about stellar-origin gravitational wave sources and their detectability in LISA or other space-based gravitational wave detectors.

LEGWORK can be used to evolve the orbits of sources due to gravitational wave emission, calculate gravitational wave strains (using post-Newtonian approximations), compute signal-to-noise ratios and visualise the results. It can be applied to a variety of potential sources, including binaries consisting of white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. Although we focus on double compact objects, in principle LEGWORK can be used for any system with a user-specified orbital evolution, such as those affected by a third object or gas drag. We optimised the package to make it efficient for use in population studies which can contain tens-of-millions of sources. We hope that LEGWORK will enable and accelerate future studies triggered by the rapidly growing interest in gravitational wave sources.

We will describe the features of the package and demonstrate a series of potential use cases, ranging from a simple SNR calculation to calculating the LISA horizon distance for binaries with a range of chirp masses and orbital frequencies.