PlasmaPy

PlasmaPy is an open source, community-developed Python 3.7+ package for plasma science. PlasmaPy intends to be for plasma science what Astropy is for astronomy — a collection of functionality commonly used and shared between plasma scientists and researchers globally, running within and leveraging the open source scientific Python ecosystem. The goals of this project are more thoroughly described in this recent video. Current functionality is described in PlasmaPy's online documentation.

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

Installation

If you have installed Python, you can install PlasmaPy from pip via

python -m pip install plasmapy

If you have installed conda, then you can also get PlasmaPy from

conda install -c conda-forge plasmapy

To contribute to the package, check out our instructions on installing PlasmaPy from source.

Community

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.

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 January 2021, our meetings are on Tuesdays at 19:00 UTC. Come discuss plasma software with us!

Weekly office hours

PlasmaPy's weekly office hours on Thursdays at 19:00 UTC are an opportunity to chat with active members of the PlasmaPy community about the package and project.

GitHub discussions

We're now trying out GitHub discussions for more varied topics that aren't exactly issues with the existing code base. It's a great place to suggest ideas, bring up discussion topics, and ask questions.

Mailing list

You can subscribe to our low-volume mailing list to receive PlasmaPy newsletters and other announcements.

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.

License

PlasmaPy is permissively licensed under a 3-clause BSD license with added protections against software patents.

Citing PlasmaPy

An emerging best practice for software citation is to cite the specific version of each software package used in a research project (instead of only citing a journal article, website, or GitHub repository). The citation should include a persistent identifier that uniquely identifies which version of the software was used. We therefore ask that you cite the specific version of PlasmaPy used in your research project. Releases of PlasmaPy are available in the PlasmaPy community on Zenodo, along with many other PlasmaPy resources. Please check our documentation for more detailed citation instructions.

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 Heliophysics Data Environment Enhancements award.