RM-Tools: Software for Analyzing Polarized Radio Spectra

TL;DR

RM-Tools is a comprehensive software package designed to analyze polarized radio spectra, enabling extraction of polarization properties like Faraday rotation measures from spectropolarimetric data, supporting large-scale sky surveys.

Contribution

The paper introduces RM-Tools, a new software suite that employs rotation measure synthesis and QU-model fitting for polarization analysis, widely adopted in major radio polarization surveys.

Findings

RM-Tools effectively derives polarization properties from broad-band radio data.

It is the primary analysis tool for large-area polarization sky surveys.

The software is freely available and compatible with various telescopes.

Abstract

Polarization observations using modern radio telescopes cover large numbers of frequency channels over broad bandwidths, and require advanced techniques to extract reliable scientific results. We present RM-Tools, analysis software for deriving polarization properties, such as Faraday rotation measures, from spectropolarimetric observations of linearly polarized radio sources. The software makes use of techniques such as rotation measure synthesis and QU-model fitting, along with many features to simplify and enhance the analysis of radio polarization data. RM-Tools is currently the main software that large-area polarization sky surveys such as POSSUM and VLASS deploy for science-ready data processing. The software code is freely available online and can be used with data from a wide range of telescopes.