EinsteinPy: A Community Python Package for General Relativity

22 May 2020  ·  Shreyas Bapat, Ritwik Saha, Bhavya Bhatt, Shilpi Jain, Akshita Jain, Sofía Ortín Vela, Priyanshu Khandelwal, Jyotirmaya Shivottam, Jialin Ma, Gim Seng Ng, Pratyush Kerhalkar, Hrishikesh Sudam Sarode, Rishi Sharma, Manvi Gupta, Divya Gupta, Tushar Tyagi, Tanmay Rustagi, Varun Singh, Saurabh Bansal, Naman Tayal, Abhijeet Manhas, Raphael Reyna, Gaurav Kumar, Govind Dixit, Ratin Kumar, Sashank Mishra, Alpesh Jamgade, Raahul Singh, Rohit Sanjay, Khalid Shaikh, Bhavam Vidyarthi, Shamanth R Nayak K, Vineet Gandham, Nimesh Vashistha, Arnav Das, Saurabh, Shreyas Kalvankar, Ganesh Tarone, Atul Mangat, Suyog Garg, Bibek Gautam, Sitara Srinivasan, Aayush Gautam, Swaastick Kumar Singh, Suyash Salampuria, Zac Yauney, Nihar Gupte, Gagan Shenoy, Micky Yun Chan ·

This paper presents EinsteinPy (version 0.3), a community-developed Python package for gravitational and relativistic astrophysics. Python is a free, easy to use a high-level programming language which has seen a huge expansion in the number of its users and developers in recent years. Specifically, a lot of recent studies show that the use of Python in Astrophysics and general physics has increased exponentially. We aim to provide a very high level of abstraction, an easy to use interface and pleasing user experience. EinsteinPy is developed keeping in mind the state of a theoretical gravitational physicist with little or no background in computer programming and trying to work in the field of numerical relativity or trying to use simulations in their research. Currently, EinsteinPy supports simulation of time-like and null geodesics and calculates trajectories in different background geometries some of which are Schwarzschild, Kerr, and KerrNewmann along with coordinate inter-conversion pipeline. It has a partially developed pipeline for plotting and visualization with dependencies on libraries like Plotly, matplotlib, etc. One of the unique features of EinsteinPy is a sufficiently developed symbolic tensor manipulation utilities which are a great tool in itself for teaching yourself tensor algebra which for many beginner students can be overwhelmingly tricky. EinsteinPy also provides few utility functions for hypersurface embedding of Schwarzschild spacetime which further will be extended to model gravitational lensing simulation.

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General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 83-04