plasmapy 0.5.0

Python package for plasma physics

PlasmaPy

PlasmaPy is an open source community developed Python 3.6+ package for plasma physics in the early stages of development. PlasmaPy intends to be for plasmas what Astropy is for astronomy — a collection of functionality commonly used and shared between plasma physicists and researchers globally, running within and leveraging the open source scientific Python ecosystem. The goals of this project are more thoroughly described in our vision statement and this recent reference. We are in the process of writing online documentation.

We created a guide on contributing to PlasmaPy and have a Code of Conduct. New contributors are very welcome!

Feedback and communication

Matrix chat

If you have any questions, the quickest way to get a response is to ask on our Matrix/Gitter channel. Both of these are the same chat channel; Gitter uses a bridge to link the two.

Discourse room

We have recently created a PlasmaPy Discourse group in order to allow threaded public discussions on a variety of topics. This group is a great place to suggest ideas, bring up discussion topics, and ask questions.

Mailing list

We also have a mailing list that serves as a less volatile discussion forum.

Suggestion box

We have a suggestion box if you would like to (optionally anonymously) suggest a feature/topic for consideration. These will be reposted on the mailing list or directly in GitHub issues, as appropriate, for further discussion.

Weekly community meetings

We have weekly community meetings in the PlasmaPy room on Jitsi. The schedule of our community meetings is on our calendar, and you may access the minutes and agendas. Any last minute changes will be discussed on Matrix. As of April 2020, our meetings are on Tuesdays at 19:00 UTC. Come discuss plasma software with us!

Installation

You can get PlasmaPy from pip via pip install plasmapy. To contribute to the package, check out our instructions on installing PlasmaPy from source.

You can also get PlasmaPy from conda via conda install -c conda-forge plasmapy.

Like most scientific Python packages, PlasmaPy probably runs better on the Anaconda distribution.

PlasmaPy requires Python 3.6+ and is not compatible with Python 2.

License

PlasmaPy is licensed under a 3-clause BSD license with added protections against software patents — see the LICENSE.md file in the top-level directory.

Citing PlasmaPy

If you use PlasmaPy in a research publication, we ask that you cite the Zenodo record for the specific version of PlasmaPy that you used. Please see the docs/about/citation.rst file for more detailed instructions on how to cite PlasmaPy.

Acknowledgements

Early development on PlasmaPy was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Smithsonian Institution, and Google Summer of Code. Ongoing PlasmaPy development is being supported through a collaborative award from the U.S. National Science Foundation's Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation program and a NASA HDEE grant.