nifty-ls: Fast and Accurate Lomb–Scargle Periodograms Using a Non-uniform FFT

Abstract We present nifty-ls , a software package for fast and accurate evaluation of the Lomb–Scargle periodogram. nifty-ls leverages the fact that Lomb–Scargle can be computed using a non-uniform fast Fourier transform (NUFFT), which we evaluate with the Flatiron Institute NUFFT package ( finufft ). This approach achieves a many-fold speedup over the Press & Rybicki method as implemented in Astropy and is simultaneously many orders of magnitude more accurate. nifty-ls also supports fast evaluation on GPUs via CUDA and integrates with the Astropy Lomb–Scargle interface. nifty-ls is publicly available at https://github.com/flatironinstitute/nifty-ls/ .