aurel: A Python package for automatic relativistic calculations

TL;DR

aurel is an open-source Python package that automates the calculation of relativistic quantities, supporting symbolic and numerical methods, and facilitates data analysis from Numerical Relativity simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible, efficient Python tool that combines symbolic and numerical relativistic calculations with data management for Numerical Relativity.

Findings

Supports symbolic tensor calculations with SymPy extension

Performs numerical tensor computations from data arrays

Facilitates post-processing of Numerical Relativity simulations

Abstract

\texttt{aurel} is an open-source Python package designed to \emph{au}tomatically calculate \emph{rel}ativistic quantities. It uses an efficient, flexible and user-friendly caching and dependency-tracking system, ideal for managing the highly nonlinear nature of general relativity. The package supports both symbolic and numerical calculations. The symbolic part extends \texttt{SymPy} with additional tensorial calculations. The numerical part computes a wide range of tensorial quantities, such as curvature, matter kinematics and much more, directly from any spacetime and matter data arrays using finite-difference methods. Inputs can be either generated from analytical expressions or imported from Numerical Relativity (NR) simulations, with helper functions provided to read in data from standard NR codes. Given the increasing use of NR, \texttt{aurel} offers a timely post-processing tool to support the popularisation of this field.