Paper detail

The Gravitational Wave Universe Toolbox: A software package to simulate observation of the Gravitational Wave Universe with different detectors

Context. As the importance of Gravitational Wave (GW) Astrophysics increases rapidly, astronomers in different fields and with different backgrounds can have the need to get a quick idea of which GW source populations can be detected by which detectors and with what measurement uncertainties. Aims. The GW-Toolbox is an easy-to-use, flexible tool to simulate observations on the GW universe with different detectors, including ground-based interferometers (advanced LIGO, advanced VIRGO, KAGRA, Einstein Telescope, and also customised designs), space-borne interferometers (LISA and a customised design), pulsar timing arrays mimicking the current working ones (EPTA, PPTA, NANOGrav, IPTA) and future ones. We include a broad range of sources such as mergers of stellar mass compact objects, namely black holes, neutron stars and black hole-neutron stars; and supermassive black hole binaries mergers and inspirals, Galactic double white dwarfs in ultra-compact orbit, extreme mass ratio inspirals and Stochastic GW backgrounds. Methods. We collect methods to simulate source populations and determine their detectability with the various detectors. The paper aims at giving a comprehensive description on the algorithm and functionality of the GW-Toolbox. Results. The GW-Toolbox produces results that are consistent with more detailed calculations of the different source classes and can be accessed with a website interface (gw-universe.org) or as a python package (https://bitbucket.org/radboudradiolab/gwtoolbox). In the future, it will be upgraded with more functionality.