Introduction

This code generates full-sky simulations of Galactic foregrounds in intensity and polarization relevant for CMB experiments. The components simulated are: thermal dust, synchrotron, AME, free-free, and CMB at a given Nside, with an option to integrate over a top hat bandpass, to add white instrument noise, and to smooth with a given beam.

There is scope for a few options for the model for each component, attempting to be consistent with current data. The current v-1.0 version has typically two-three options for each component.

Currently much of the available data is limited in resolution at degree-scale. We therefore make efforts to provide reasonable small-scale simulations to extend the data to higher multipoles. The details of the procedures developed can be found in the accompanying paper.

This code is based on the large-scale Galactic part of Planck Sky Model (Delabrouille 2012) code and uses some of its inputs.

Dependencies

PySM is written in Python and uses the healpy, numpy, scipy, and astropy packages. It is known to work with:

• python 2.7.6
• healpy 1.10.3
• numpy 1.12.1
• scipy 0.19.0

Installation

Clone the GitHub repository and run:

[sudo] python setup.py install [--user]

After this you can run the provided unit tests from the same directory:

nosetests

Then you may import PySM in the standard way in a Python environment:

import pysm