An open source software ecosystem for plasma physics

The research team will lead the development of PlasmaPy and affiliated packages to foster the creation of an open source software ecosystem for plasma physics. The PlasmaPy core package will contain functionality needed by plasma physicists across disciplines, whereas affiliated packages will contain more specialized functionality. At the beginning of the project, the research team will refactor existing code, improve tests, formalize the software architecture, and improve PlasmaPy's base data structures in order to provide a solid foundation for future development. Subsequent code development priorities include a dispersion relation solver for plasma waves and instabilities, the groundwork for a flexible framework for plasma simulation, time series turbulence analysis tools, classes for the analysis of plasma diagnostics, and tools to provide access to atomic and physical data. They will make base data structures compatible with open source packages for data science to enable future data science studies. The research team will actively seek input and feedback from the plasma physics community, and adjust code development priorities based on this feedback. The team will hold workshops each year and actively support new users and contributors to grow PlasmaPy into a self-sustaining project.This collaborative frameworks proposal was submitted to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI) program (solicitation 19-458)