PlasmaPy as an educational resource

ORAL

Abstract

The mission of the PlasmaPy project is to foster the creation of a fully open source software ecosystem for plasma science. An essential part of that mission is to create open access educational resources. For example, PlasmaPy's example gallery contains Jupyter notebooks that cover topics such as plasma parameters in the solar atmosphere and Earth's magnetosphere, particle drifts, plasma wave dispersion relationships, Langmuir probe analysis, Thomson scattering, and synthetic charged particle radiography. These notebooks can be downloaded, modified, and re-executed. Several of these notebooks have been adapted into interactive tutorials for use at summer schools, conferences, and Plasma Hack Week. We invite the broader plasma community to contribute notebooks to PlasmaPy's gallery, and to use the example gallery in plasma courses. Finally, we will describe the need for courses and trainings that cover essential research software engineering skills that are needed for plasma research involving software.

*Ongoing development of PlasmaPy is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, with many contributions from the broader plasma physics and open source communities. Past development of PlasmaPy has been supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Smithsonian Institution, NASA, and Google Summer of Code.

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Presenters

  • Nicholas Murphy

    • Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

Authors

  • Nicholas Murphy

    • Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

  • Peter V Heuer

    • Laboratory for Laser Energetics

  • Erik Everson

    • University of California, Los Angeles

  • Dominik Stańczak

    • University of Warsaw

  • Bennett Maruca

    • University of Delaware

  • Stephen T Vincena

    • UCLA
    • University of California, Los Angeles

  • Jayden Roberts

    • University of Rochester