About The Project

The $Z^2_n$ Software was developed by Yohan Alexander as a research project, funded by the CNPq Institution, and it is a Open Source initiative. The program allows the user to calculate periodograms using the $Z^2_n$ statistics a la Buccheri et al. 1983.

The $Z^2_n$ is a periodogram based on the Rayleigh method, which applies the time samples in a signal to a Fourier analysis. This method has been shown to be useful in detecting periodic signals at high frequencies associated with the rotation of compact objects.

First, each event is reduced to a phase value $\phi_j$, in the range of 0 to 1, where $frac (x) = x - \lfloor x \rfloor$ such that for the $j$-th event we have the following equation, where $\Delta t_{ij}$ is the time of the event under analysis $t_j$ minus the time of the first detected event $T_0$.

$\phi_j [0,1] = frac(v_i\Delta t_{ij} + \dot v_i \frac{\Delta t^2_{ij}}{2} + \dot v_i \frac{\Delta t^3_{ij}}{6})$

The $Z^2_n$ power spectrum, where $n$ is the number of harmonics included in the power, and $N$ is the number of events, is calculated from the equation which is defined as follows.

${\color{red}Z^2_n =} {\color{blue}\frac{2}{N}} {\color{black}\cdot} {\color{green}\sum_{k=1}^{n}} [({\color{green}\sum_{j=1}^{N}} {\color{magenta}cos}({\color{red}k}{\color{blue}\phi_j})) ^ 2 + ({\color{green}\sum_{j=1}^{N}} {\color{magenta}sin}({\color{red}k}{\color{blue}\phi_j})) ^ 2]$

Note that this is potentially very computationally expensive, as there are two variables by which we are doing a loop, $\color{red}k$ which represents the frequencies, and $\color{blue}j$ which are the indices of the event.

Think of the loop $\color{blue}j$ as being within the loop $\color{red}k$. For each new $\color{red}k$, we get the full range of $\color{blue}j$, which is why the periodogram can sometimes be very slow, since the execution time of the algorithm grows at a exponential rate $O(n^2)$.

Built With

The Z2n Software was built using the Python open source language, and optimized with the Numba JIT (just-in-time) compiler.

• Python
• Numba