PlasmaPy v2024.2.0 (2024-02-06)

Backwards Incompatible Changes

• Created new plasmapy.simulation.particle_tracker.ParticleTracker object for general particle pushing simulations involving electromagnetic fields. The tracker replaces the old plasmapy.simulation.particletracker.ParticleTracker. (#2245)

• Imports of classes and functions from plasmapy.utils must now be made directly from the subpackages and modules, rather than from plasmapy.utils itself. (#2403)

• Moved mass_density and its alias rho_ from plasmapy.formulary.misc to plasmapy.formulary.densities. (#2410)

Features

• Added a notch argument to spectral_density, which allows users to output spectrum over one or multiple wavelength ranges to correspond to a notch filter commonly applied to experimentally measured Thomson scattering spectra. Changed the spectral_density_model function to allow notch to be applied during fitting. (#2058)

• Changed unit annotations to Quantity type hint annotations. (#2421)

• Enabled particle_input() to decorate functions which have variadic positional arguments followed by keyword arguments. (#2428; see also #2150)

• Added a random_seed keyword in the create_particles method of the Tracker class to make the function deterministic to resolve intermittent test failures. (#2487)

Bug Fixes

• Enabled particle_input() to be compatible with postponed evaluation of annotations (see PEP 563). (#2479)

Improved Documentation

• Switched from sphinx_toolbox.collapse to sphinx_collapse for including collapsible content in our documentation. (#2387)

• Added a discussion of type hint annotations in the Testing Guide within the Contributor Guide. (#2440)

Trivial/Internal Changes

• Added Python 3.12 to the suite of continuous integration tests. (#2368)

• Added a GitHub Action that will create an issue containing a release checklist, which will largely supersede the release process outlined in the Contributor Guide. (#2376)

• Separated the GitHub Action for checking hyperlinks in the documentation into its own GitHub Action. (#2392)

• Replaced black with ruff in the pre-commit configuration. (#2394)

• Modified the __exit__ method of HDF5Reader for context management. (#2402)

• Added an initial configuration for mypy that temporarily ignores existing errors. (#2424)

• Added a tox environment for running mypy. (#2431)

• Added mypy to the suite of continuous integration checks. (#2432)

• Used autotyping to implement type hint annotations for special methods like __init__ and __str__, and changed -> typing.NoReturn annotations to -> None. (#2437)

• Used autotyping to add -> None return annotations to functions and methods with no return statement. (#2439)

• Added a stub file containing type hint annotations for @wrapt.decorator. (#2442)

• Improved type hint annotations for plasmapy.particles.decorators, which includes particle_input(), and the corresponding tests. (#2443)

• Dropped the pre-commit hook for isort and enabled all isort rules in ruff. (#2453)

• Added a py.typed marker file to indicate that PlasmaPy contains type hint annotations as per PEP 561. (#2473)

• Changed _nearest_neighbor_interpolator method in grids to interpolate quantities array instead of producing an intermediate index. (#2475)

• Enabled the sphinx linkchecker in quiet mode to make it easier to find problem links from the console output. (#2476)

• Bumped the minimum versions of dependencies to drop support for minor releases older than two years old. In particular, the minimum version of NumPy was bumped to 1.23.0. (#2488)