PlasmaPy 0.6.0

We're really happy to announce that we've just released PlasmaPy version 0.6.0!

We'd like to thank the wonderful people who have contributed to this release:

• Anthony Vo
• Dhawal Modi *
• Dominik Stańczak
• Drozdov David *
• Erik Everson
• Kevin Montes *
• Nick Murphy
• Peter Heuer
• Ramiz Qudsi
• Tiger Du

Where a * indicates their first contribution to PlasmaPy.

Note also that this release drops Python 3.6 support; we now require Python 3.7, following NumPy's NEP 29.

The cool new features

Note: these are my (Dominik's) personal highlights. There's more, but these make the prettiest plots right now.

Two-fluid dispersion relations

In PR #932 Ramiz Qudsi implemented P. M. Bellan's 2012 full two-fluid dispersion relation for any electron-ion system. Take a look at the notebook introducing that.

Proton radiography

Peter Heuer designed and implemented a framework for synthetic proton radiography. This is a multi-PR tour de force that simulates particles moving through EM fields and hitting a detector plane, generating histograms such as the above. I'd point you to the notebook on that, but there's three right now.

Analysis & Diagnostic framework; Langmuir probes

Erik Everson is spearheading work on our analysis & diagnostic framework. As the first example, we've got a new and improved set of tools for swept Langmuir analysis.

What's next?

For this year, we're planning to have a roughly 3-month cadence for releases. Thus, the next release is anticipated around mid June.

It should contain a refactored particle tracker, support for neoclassical transport coefficient calculations for axisymmetric devices along with our first forays into tools for fusion.

One final note: we're discussing transitioning to some form of Calendar Versioning. If you have thoughts on that, we'd be happy to hear them! Come join the discussion on our Matrix chatroom.

We are pleased to announce the release of PlasmaPy version 0.4.0. This release adds several new functions to plasmapy.formulary, aliases (with trailing underscores) for the most commonly used formulary functions, classes to represent custom and dimensionless particles, and a new module in plasmapy.diagnostics for Thomson scattering. The plasmapy.atomic subpackage was renamed to plasmapy.particles as part of an ongoing plan to reorganize PlasmaPy's subpackage structure.

In order to install PlasmaPy, please refer to the installation instructions on PlasmaPy's documentation page.

We are excited to announce the release of PlasmaPy version 0.3.1. This release includes two new subpackages: plasmapy.formulary, which consolidates much of the functionality that was formerly in plasmapy.physics, plasmapy.mathematics, and plasmapy.transport; and plasmapy.simulation, which contains our particle tracker and will be the place to consolidate tools related to plasma simulations. These changes are part of an ongoing plan to reorganize PlasmaPy's subpackage structure that will continue in version 0.4. In order to install PlasmaPy, please refer to the installation instructions on PlasmaPy's documentation page.

A few days ago the long overdue PlasmaPy release v0.2.0 hit PyPI with the force of a coronal mass ejection. You can upgrade via pip install --upgrade plasmapy.

If you'd rather use conda, though, you now have the option, and that is why we delayed the announcement: we now have our very own conda-forge feedstock and you can install PlasmaPy using conda install -c conda-forge plasmapy.

Please refer to the release notes to see what's changed.

Happy coding, everyone!

We have just released PlasmaPy v0.1.1, our first bugfix release which attempts to correct many of the flaws in our code we only noticed while releasing v0.1!

Take a look at the release notes to see what's changed.

As usual (although this is likely the first time you have reason to run this command), you should now be able to update via pip install --upgrade plasmapy.

Hot plasmas, and happy coding, everyone!

I address you tonight not as a programmer of Python, not as a maintainer of a repository, but as a citizen of open source.

We are faced with the very newest of releases.

GitHub calls this one PlasmaPy v0.1.0, the first of the alphas.

And yet, for the first time in the history of this project our team has the technology to prevent its own procrastination.

All of you pip installing with us need to know that everything that could be done to delay this release has been called into service.

The coder's thirst for excellence, perfectionism, every step into the abyss of transport theory, every adventurous refactor of docs, all of our combined ideas for features and improvements, even the code reviews that we performed have provided us with the tools to prevent this exciting event.

Through all the chaos that is our Git tree, through all of the PEP8 and the Matrix discussion, through all the pain of learning Sphinx and rebasing, through all of our ~2000 commits, there is one thing that has nourished our souls, and pushed us to complete this release, and that is our pretty plots. Oh, and the possibility to apply more decorators.

The dreams of the entire PlasmaPy community are focused tonight on these 31 brave committers, pushing onto the main branch.

And may we all, plasma enthusiasts the world over, see this release through.

Thermal speed, and a \(\sqrt{2}\) to you,

~PlasmaPy