Overview of broken power law functions and fitting them to data

powerlaws.ipynb

resources.md

Similar functions in other software packages

• Astropy source for their included power law models
• Astropy API reference for astropy.modeling.powerlaws.BrokenPowerLaw1D (and SmoothlyBrokenPowerLaw1D)
• Xspec reference: bkn2pow model
• gammapy Smooth Broken Power Law Spectral Model (gammapy.modeling.models.SmoothBrokenPowerLawSpectralModel)

Literature^†

• Methods and results of an automatic analysis of a complete sample of Swift-XRT observations of GRBs (§2.4 in particular)
• High-Energy Spectral Breaks in Gamma-Ray Bursts
• Smoothly Broken Power Law Spectra of Gamma-Ray Bursts
• Analyzing Gamma-Ray Burst Spectral Data
• Maximum likelihood estimation of the broken power law spectral parameters with detector design applications

^†Many of these papers deal with GRBs (lightcurves, spectra, etc.) and the like, but my goal for this project would be to create a general tool that could be applied to anything that takes the form of a broken PL.