dfrodriguezp / PiCM

Educational software for the simulation of the dynamics of charged particles with periodic boundary conditions.

PiCM

Software for simulation of the dynamics of charged particles with periodic boundary conditions.

If you want the program to run much faster, I encourage you to use the C++ version.

Requirements

You need Python3 with the following modules:

• NumPy
• tqdm
• Click
• Matplotlib

These can be installed via

$ pip install numpy tqdm click matplotlib

or

$ conda install numpy tqdm click matplotlib

Running the program

1. Clone or download the repository.
2. Open a terminal and simply type

$ python3 main.py path/to/jsonfile.json

Of course, you must know how to build that JSON file and what it contains. This is further explained in the Wiki of this repository.

Example

Let's perform a simulation of a two-stream instability. For this, there is a script called build_two_stream.py which creates the sample file as well as the .json file. You can set the parameters you prefer. Note: for this example, let's pretend you didn't modified it.

1. Open a terminal inside the repository folder.
2. Run the sample script

$ python3 build_two_stream.py

This will create a folder with the name specified in the output variable. Inside that folder you can find both the sample and the .json file. The sample file is called two_stream.dat and the JSON file sim_two_stream.json.

3. Run the simulation

$ python3 main.py electrostatic/sim_two_stream.json

4. Plot the energy

$ python3 plotters/plot_energy.py electrostatic/sim_two_stream.json

5. Plot the phase space in the step 150

$ python3 plotters/plot_phase_space.py electrostatic/sim_two_stream.json 150