Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is now v9r13. Here are the package differences from v9r12. Jim reports that the driver for the release was some changes to support Pass 7 reprocessing (see below) but does not include Pass 7 IRFs (all of which are preliminary at this point). The release includes the speed-up for Likelihood analysis and the new options for simulating isotropic sources that were mentioned in last week's report.
Eric W. reports that he is starting work on a port of v9r13 to the FSSC build environment. For the packages/tools that are part of the FSSC builds this will mean that a larger variety of binary distributions will be available.
Late breaking: Jean has reported that hidden parameters have a surprising feature in the Science Tools. He points out that the switch to toltype=ABS in gtlike (the default since v9r12 for this hidden parameter) will not take place if the user already has a local copy of gtlike.par with the earlier default (toltype=REL). James Peachey reminds that the FTOOL pset can be used to permanently change the value of a hidden parameter.
Data products: The full Pass 7 reprocessing is "charging ahead" at the Merit level, and the results are being checked. As of this writing (Monday evening), 1,384,014,512 events have been processed, according to the Data Catalog.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he is continuing to work on improving the unit tests for the pulsar tools
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Important update for Pass 7 From Jim:
From the user perspective, the main change is the content of the EVENT_CLASS variable in FT1, which is now filled with FT1EventClass from merit. Operationally, this means that one can now filter on event class using gtselect, e.g.,
gtselect evclsmin=3
instead of needing to resort to using fcopy (or the like) to filter on CTBCLASSLEVEL (now no longer filled in FT1). There is a related change in gtdiffrsp. Previously, one could restrict the diffuse response calculation to diffuse class photons (even if the FT1 file contained transient and source class events) by doing
gtdiffrsp ctbmin=3
Now one would do
gtdiffrsp evclsmin=3
Source Catalog
Last week the topics included unidentified sources, the pulsar catalog, the influence of the diffuse emission model on the 6-month source list, and plans for the 9-month source list, which Jean is decoupling from Pass 7.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is still v9r12.
Data products: Reprocessing for Pass 7 is being tested, at the Merit file level.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
From Jim:
- I re-implemented the BandFunction available for Likelihood analyses in order to allow users to specify the energy scale for evaluating the power-law parts of that function (J. Ballet request). The workbook documentation has been updated (Likelihood v14r8)
- I modified gtfindsrc, gttsmap, the TS calculation in gtlike and pyLikelihood, and the upper limits calculation in pyLikelihood to use the new function in the optimizers package, Optimizer::find_min_only (in optimizers v2r15p9), which skips the covariance matrix calculation at the best-fit location. This should speed up the execution of these tools [possibly by a factor of a few]. (Likelihood v14r9, pyLikelihood v1r12p2)
- The error radius returned by gtfindsrc now includes the 1.51 factor derived by Juergen. This means that the reported value can be directly interpreted as 68% containment radius.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he is continuing to work on improving the unit tests for the pulsar tools
Observation simulation
From Jim: "I modified the Isotropic source used in gtobssim to model the extragalactic diffuse component. Users can now specify a cone on the sky over which the incident photons will be generated. Here is an example xml definition:
<source name="Extragalactic_diffuse_20">
<spectrum escale="MeV">
<SpectrumClass name="Isotropic" params="flux=10.7,gamma=2.1,emin=20.,emax=2e5,ra=0,dec=0,radius=20"/>
<use_spectrum frame="galaxy"/>
</spectrum>
</source>
(celestialSources/genericSources v1r13)
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No new news
Source Catalog
No meeting last week
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is now v9r12. Here are the package differences from v9r11. As Jim summarizes it, the new release includes updates to the pulsar tools, and the new P6_V4 & P6_V5 IRFs, and the corrected energy dispersions for P6_V[3-5]. See Riccardo's Summary of response function sets.
Note that the P6_V4 and P6_V5 IRFs have the azimuthal variation of the effective area; Jim reminds me that gtltcube can now tabulate the azimuthal dependence of the livetime accumulation with the command-line parameter phibins, which defaults to 0. I'm not aware of studies yet of the effect of accounting for azimuthal variations on the likelihood analysis of sources.
Eric W. reports that the FSSC is about to start porting v9r12 to the build system at the FSSC.
Data products: Reprocessing for Pass 7 is still getting into gear, now anticipated for later this week. The actual reprocessing should take only a day or so.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
Jim reports that the main update to Likelihood in v9r12 is the switch to absolute tolerances as the default way to specify convergence tolerances.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "Nothing spectacular in the pulsar tools development. Some bugs and issues were resolved, then the pulsar tools packages were tagged. The new versions are all tested all right, according the Release Manager at SLAC, as a part of Science Tools v9r12. Also, I started working on improving their unit tests because some test conditions are too loose."
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No new news
Source Catalog
Last week Andrea discussed the plans for the first LAT pulsar catalog and Jean described the development of the 9-month source list.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r11. Eric Winter reports that the FSSC is working toward an internal freeze date in June for their next public release of the Science Tools, planned to coincide with the public release of the LAT data in August.
Data products: Reprocessing for Pass 7 is still getting into gear, now anticipated for early next week. The actual reprocessing should take only a day or so.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
Juergen has documented differences in spectral analysis results between unbinned and binned likelihood analysis for extended sources. Jim is suspecting that the issue is with gtdiffrsp for extended (but not all-sky) sources. The binned likelihood results, which do not rely on the diffuse responses, appear to be reliable.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that there's no news this week.
Observation simulation
No new news.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
(Updated carry over from last week) In Science Tools v9r11 gtexpcube has a default parameter file that has hardwired inputs and does not prompt the user for inputs. This is in JIRA. As a workaround, Jim points out that you can run 'gtexpcube mode=q', which forces the tool to prompt for input.
Source Catalog
Last week Steve Fegan presented a comparison of methods for evaluating upper limits, Robin presented an investigation of power spectra of 6-month catalog sources and Toby presented a comprehensive, uniform set of source location, confidence region, and spectrum plots for these sources. Gulli described steps toward refining the Galactic diffuse emission model. The updates to the BSL paper was also discussed.