Plasmapy v0.4.0 (2020-07-20)

This release of PlasmaPy contains 50 commits in 46 merged pull requests closing 25 issues from 9 people, 5 of which are first-time contributors to PlasmaPy.

The people who have contributed to the code for this release are:

• Ankur Chattopadhyay *
• Anthony Vo *
• Diego Diaz
• Dominik Stańczak
• Jakub Polak *
• KhalilBryant *
• Nick Murphy
• Peter Heuer *
• rocco8773

Where a * indicates their first contribution to PlasmaPy.

Backwards Incompatible Changes

• Rename plasmapy.atomic to particles. In collisions and braginskii, change arguments named particles to species and arguments named ion_particle to ion for multiple functions. (#742)
• Officially delete plasmapy.examples. (#822)
• Move plasmapy.data to plasmapy.particle.data. (#823)
• Renamed the plasmapy.classes subpackage to plasmapy.plasma. (#842)

Features

• Added units to reprs of .formulary.magnetostatics classes. (#743)

• Create prototype abstract interfaces for plasma simulations (#753)

• Created classes to represent custom and dimensionless particles in plasmapy.particles. (#755)

• Create relativistic_energy() function, which uses the established Lorentz_factor() function to aid in the calculation of the relativistic energy of an object. (#805)

• Create Reynolds_number() function. (#815)

• Create Mag_Reynolds() function. (#820)

• Create Bohm_diffusion() function. (#830)

• Added a new diagnostics module thomson containing a function spectral_density that calculates Thomson scattering spectra for Maxwellian plasmas in both the collective and non-collective regimes. As a followup to PR #835, set the minimal required Numpy version to 1.18.1 to finally fix unit dropping bugs. (#831)

• Revised parameters.thermal_speed to support 1D and 2D distributions as well as 3D, and added an example notebook for this function. (#850)

• Create plasmapy/formulary/ionization.py Create Z_bal() function. (#851)

• Create Saha() function. (#860)

• Added aliases (with trailing underscores) for parameters in the formulary:

  • plasmapy.formulary.dimensionless.Reynolds_number -> Re_
  • plasmapy.formulary.dimensionless.Mag_Reynolds -> Rm_
  • plasmapy.formulary.drifts.ExB_drift -> veb_
  • plasmapy.formulary.drifts.force_drift -> vfd_
  • plasmapy.formulary.parameters.mass_density -> rho_
  • plasmapy.formulary.parameters.Afven_speed -> va_
  • plasmapy.formulary.parameters.ion_sound_speed -> cs_
  • plasmapy.formulary.parameters.thermal_speed -> vth_
  • plasmapy.formulary.parameters.thermal_pressure -> pth_
  • plasmapy.formulary.parameters.kappa_thermal_speed -> vth_kappa_
  • plasmapy.formulary.parameters.inertial_length -> cwp_
  • plasmapy.formulary.parameters.Hall_parameter -> betaH_
  • plasmapy.formulary.parameters.gyrofrequency -> oc_, wc_
  • plasmapy.formulary.parameters.gyroradius -> rc_, rhoc_
  • plasmapy.formulary.parameters.plasma_frequency -> wp_
  • plasmapy.formulary.parameters.Debye_length -> lambdaD_
  • plasmapy.formulary.parameters.Debye_number -> nD_
  • plasmapy.formulary.parameters.magnetic_pressure -> pmag_
  • plasmapy.formulary.parameters.magnetic_energy_density -> ub_
  • plasmapy.formulary.parameters.upper_hybrid_frequency -> wuh_
  • plasmapy.formulary.parameters.lower_hybrid_frequency -> wlh_
  • plasmapy.formulary.parameters.Bohm_diffusion -> DB_
  • plasmapy.formulary.quantum.deBroglie_wavelength -> lambdaDB_
  • plasmapy.formulary.quantum.thermal_deBroglie_wavelength -> lambdaDB_th_
  • plasmapy.formulary.quantum.Fermi_energy -> Ef_ (#865)

• Add json_dumps method to AbstractParticle to convert a particle object into a JSON string. Add json_dump method to AbstractParticle to serialize a particle object and writes it to a file. Add JSON decoder ParticleJSONDecoder to deserialize JSON objects into particle objects. Add plasmapy.particles.serialization.json_loads_particle function to convert JSON strings to particle objects (using ParticleJSONDecoder). Add plasmapy.particles.json_load_particle function to deserialize a JSON file into a particle object (using ParticleJSONDecoder). (#836)

Bug Fixes

• Fix incorrect use of pkg.resources when defining plasmapy.__version__. Add setuptools to package dependencies. Add a definition of __version__ for developers using source files. (#774)
• Repair notebook links that are defined in the nbsphinx_prolog sphinx configuration variable. (#828)
• Increase the required Astropy version from 3.1 to 4.0, Numpy from 1.14 to 1.16.6, Scipy from 0.19 to 1.2 and lmfit from 0.9.7 to 1.0.1. This fixes long-standing issues with Numpy operations dropping units from AstroPy quantities. (#835)

Improved Documentation

• • Added documentation to file test_converters (#756)
• • Updated installation instructions. (#772)
• Reorder documentation page (#777)
• Fix failing documentation build due to duplicate docstrings for ParticleTracker.kinetic_energy_history and incompatibility of sphinx-automodapi with sphinx v3.0.0. (#780)
• Automate definition of documentation release and version in docs/conf.py with plasmapy.__version__. (#781)
• Add a docstring to __init__.py in plasmapy.formulary. (#788)
• Replaced sphinx-gallery with nbsphinx, turning py example files into ipynb files and allowing for easier example submission. (#792)
• Linked various instances of classes and functions in the ipynb examples in docs/notebooks/ to the respective API docs. (#825)
• Fixed a few documentation formatting errors. (#827)
• Add notes on the PlasmaPy benchmarks repository to documentation. (#841)
• Improve readability of the plasmapy.formulary page by replacing the toctree list with a cleaner reST table. (#867)

Trivial/Internal Changes

• Remove mutable arguments from Particle.is_category method. (#751)
• Remove all occurrences of default mutable arguments (#754)
• Handle ModuleNotFoundError when trying to import __version__ but setuptools_scm has not generated the version.py file. This commonly happens during development when plasmapy is not installed in the python environment. (#763)
• Updated pep8speaks/flake8 configuration and added pre-commit-config.yaml to simplify automated style checks during development. (#770)
• Removes some lint from setup.py and setup.cfg. Use pkg_resources for version checking in code. Remove version.py file in favor of pkg_resources. (#771)
• Default settings for isort were set to be consistent with default settings for black. (#773)
• Update community meeting and funding information in docs. (#784)
• Improved pull request template to include more information about changelog entries. (#843)
• Added GitHub actions that apply pre-commit and flake8 (separately) to incoming pull requests. (#845)
• Apply pre-commit hooks to entire repository, so that GitHub actions do not shout at contributors needlessly. (#846)
• Update CustomParticle so input parameters mass and charge can accept string representations of astropy Quantities. (#862)