PSRSALSA
A Suite of ALgorithms for Statistical Analysis of pulsar data
Download/compilation:
The latest version can be downloaded from github using the following steps:- Download source code (a directory psrsalsa will be made): git clone https://github.com/weltevrede/psrsalsa.git
- Follow the instructions in psrsalsa/README.txt as you may need to install additional dependencies, and set some environment variables for compilation to work if libraries cannot be found. The main dependencies are:
- libcfitsio
- libgsl
- libgslcblas
- libfftw3
- libfftw3f
- libcpgplot
- libgfortran
- libpgplot
- Compile the source code with: make (or make nopy if you don't want to compile the psrsalsa python module)
- Once compiled without errors, the executables should appear in psrsalsa/bin/. Suggestions are made of environment variable to add to your login scripts.
- To update the code, run "git pull" in the psrsalsa/ directory and re-compile. To do this first do "make clean" followed by "make".
Alternatively, a tarball with the source-code can as well, although that might not be the most up to date version (last updated on 16 Sep 2026). A log of the made changes can be found here.
If you make use of PSRSALSA, please cite "Weltevrede 2016, A&A, 590, A109" and the following website as well: "https://github.com/weltevrede/psrsalsa". Please do not directly refer to the location of this website, as this location is likely to change in the future.
Tutorial and documentation:
Besides the official PSRSALSA publication, which is also on astro-ph/, some additional documentation and a tutorial is available as well. The tutorial depends on the following two input data files: file1 and file2. A manual for the psrsalsa python module can be found in pywrapper/manual.pdf as part of the psrsalsa distribution.PSRSALSA:
The tools included in this package have some overlap with tools provided by for instance PSRCHIVE, but the emphasis is on single-pulse modulation and polarization analysis. The functionality of the PSRSALSA package includes, but is not limited to, the following:
- Tools to analyse periodic subpulse modulation in various ways.
- A tool to fit the rotating vector model to the polarization position angle curve of pulsars to derive viewing geometries.
- Tools to analyse and fit the observed flux-distribution of individual pulses, including the possibility to remove the effect of the noise distribution during the fitting process.
- Plotting tools for various types of data, visualised in various different ways, either from the command line or interactively.
- Functionality to do various standard data processing operations, including de-dispersion, averaging, rebinning, rotating data in pulse phase and removing the average noise level (baseline) in various ways. There is functionality to flag and remove frequency channels and subintegrations from a data set.
- Support of the PSRFITS, SIGPROC, EPN, and ASCII data formats.
