pymhd 0.1.1

A Python package for post-processing MHD turbulence simulations

PyMHD

A Python package for post-processing magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence simulations.

Features

• High-fidelity a posteriori estimation of numerical dissipation in MHD turbulence simulations;
• Computation and visualization of turbulent energy spectra;
• Visualization of 2D slices of MHD variables;
• Built-in support for simulations from the Athena family, including Athena++, AthenaK, and AthenaPK;
• Support for driven MHD turbulence (e.g., Alfvénic turbulence and small-scale dynamos), driven hydrodynamic turbulence, and MRI-driven turbulence (from shearing-box simulations) with triply periodic boundary conditions;
• Support for adiabatic and isothermal equations of state (EoS); TODO: add support for incompressible EoS;
• TODO: Computation and visualization of correlation functions;
• TODO: Spectral energy transfer analysis following Grete, Philipp, et al. Physics of Plasmas 24.9 (2017).
• TODO: Support JAX acceleration on GPUs and multi-node CPUs (currently, certain algorithms support parallelism on single-node, multi-core CPUs).

Quick Start

Installation

Install PyMHD from PyPI via:

pip install pymhd

This will automatically install PyMHD and its required dependencies, including:

• NumPy for core computation;
• JAX for parallel acceleration on single-node, multi-core CPUs; therefore, the CPU version of JAX is required;
• yt and h5py for extracting data from HDF5 output files, specifically Athena++ .athdf files, AthenaK .bin files, and AthenaPK .phdf files;
• Matplotlib for plotting functionality in the pymhd.plot modules;
• KDEpy for plotting smoothed histograms of numerical dissipation data in the pymhd.plot.nd module.

Built-in Examples

For a quick start, clone the source repository, for example:

git clone https://github.com/PlasmaHua/PyMHD.git

Then navigate to the ./examples subdirectory using cd PyMHD/examples, where two AthenaK simulation examples are provided.

Under construction.

Analyze Your Own Athena Simulations

PyMHD natively supports simulations from Athena++, AthenaK, and AthenaPK. Use the pymhd.output2turbulence function to extract output data and input-file metadata, then construct a PyMHD Turbulence object for further analysis.

API Documentation

Under construction.

Citation

If PyMHD contributes to your work in any way, please consider citing the package via:

@misc{Hua2026,
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20749062},
  url = {https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.20749062},
  author = {Hua, Yuyang},
  title = {PyMHD: Python package for post-processing MHD turbulence simulations},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  year = {2026},
  copyright = {MIT License}
}

If you specifically use the framework for numerical dissipation estimation, please cite our method paper via: