Mocking the Weak Lensing universe: the LensTools python computing package

TL;DR

LensTools is a Python software package that streamlines weak gravitational lensing simulations, measurements, and parameter analysis, facilitating collaboration and efficiency in the growing WL research community.

Contribution

It provides an integrated, user-friendly pipeline for WL simulations and analysis, combining existing open-source tools with new routines in a single accessible package.

Findings

Enables efficient WL simulations and measurements

Facilitates theoretical studies and experiment forecasts

Integrates with popular scientific Python libraries

Abstract

We present a newly developed software package which implements a wide range of routines frequently used in Weak Gravitational Lensing (WL). With the continuously increasing size of the WL scientific community we feel that easy to use Application Program Interfaces (APIs) for common calculations are a necessity to ensure efficiency and coordination across different working groups. Coupled with existing open source codes, such as CAMB and Gadget2, LensTools brings together a cosmic shear simulation pipeline which, complemented with a variety of WL feature measurement tools and parameter sampling routines, provides easy access to the numerics for theoretical studies of WL as well as for experiment forecasts. Being implemented in python, LensTools takes full advantage of a range of state--of--the art techniques developed by the large and growing open--source software community (scipy,pandas,astropy,scikit-learn,emcee). We made the LensTools code available on the Python Package Index and published its documentation on http://lenstools.readthedocs.io