Foundational Cyberinfrastructure for Open Plasma Science

PlasmaPy is an open source Python package containing core functionality for plasma science. The overall mission of the PlasmaPy project is to grow a fully open source software ecosystem for plasma research and education: a collection of scientific software packages that are developed together, work together, and co-evolve in the same environment. The project team will expand PlasmaPy to include additional, powerful tools for analyzing data from the most important and widely used diagnostics in high energy density physics and magnetized laboratory plasma experiments. The team will expand functionality needed by the heliophysics community to analyze and understand measurements of plasma in the solar wind, Earth’s magnetosphere, and coronal mass ejections. They will then develop software infrastructure in PlasmaPy to make laboratory plasma data sets findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) and improve the plasma science data environment. The proposed enhancements to PlasmaPy are focused on three scientific areas (laboratory plasma physics, high energy density physics, and heliophysics) and will be developed in close collaboration with researchers in these communities. Because few members of the plasma community are experienced contributors to open source software projects, the project team will forge a partnership between PlasmaPy and the Computational Research Access Network (CRANE) and provide numerous training opportunities for undergraduate and post-baccalaureate students and plasma scientists. These opportunities are needed to train the next generation of research software engineers (RSEs) in plasma science and significantly grow the contributor base for PlasmaPy.