adrn / old-bfe

Basis Function Expansions of gravitational potentials.

Biff

Basis Function Expansions of gravitational potentials.

Why?

Galactic dynamical modeling is often done with simple, analytic potential forms --- these are unrealistic and artificially restrictive models. If we want to understand the degeneracies and inferential power in our data, we need to move to more flexible models that encompass our complete ignorance on the shape of the Galactic potential at $r > 10~{\rm kpc}$. Representing the potential using a basis function expansion is one way to do this.

What?

I've ripped the relevant BFE code out of SCF and re-implemented it here in Cython.

How?

To build the Cython code, you'll need the GNU scientific library. On a Mac, I recommend installing this with Homebrew. Then, you should be able to just do:

python setup.py build_ext
python setup.py install

to install Biff.