PHARE

Parallel hybrid particle-in-cell code with adaptive mesh refinement

PHARE is an open-source hybrid particle-in-cell code for collisionless plasmas. Ions are followed as macro-particles; electrons are a massless, isothermal fluid whose momentum equation gives the electric field. Patch-based adaptive mesh refinement (SAMRAI) refines the grid in user-defined boxes or where the magnetic field varies sharply. PHARE runs in 1D, 2D and 3D with MPI and is driven from Python.

Installation Documentation Source code Citation

Three panels of ion density from a 2D PHARE run: the full domain, the refined patches in a zoomed region, and the density in that region. — Ion density in a 2D PHARE simulation at t = 424.66, in units of the inverse ion cyclotron frequency. Top: full domain. Middle: boundaries of the refined patches in the boxed region. Bottom: density in that region. to validate

1D · 2D · 3Dinterpolation orders 1 to 3

AMRpatch-based (SAMRAI), refinement ratio 2

MPIoptional dynamic load balancing

Pythoninput scripts and post-processing

GPLv3licence

News

2026-09-30 Adaptive time stepping for the MHD solver. #1231
2026-06-13 A standalone finite-volume MHD solver, configured from Python, with 1D, 2D and 3D test cases. #1218
2026-04-07 3D hybrid simulations, including 3D particle splitting for refined levels. #1158
2026-02-17 VTK-HDF output, readable directly by ParaView. #1141
2024-07-22 Optional dynamic load balancing across MPI ranks. #807
2024 The PHARE method paper is published in Computer Physics Communications.
2022-06-21 Automatic refinement in 2D. #678
2022-03-07 Checkpoint and restart. #649
2021-07-07 2D hybrid simulations with mesh refinement. #551
2021-01-15 Automatic refinement in 1D: cells are tagged where the magnetic field varies sharply. #399
2020-11-20 First 1D run with self-consistent refinement.
2020-11-07 Smets et al., on particle splitting for refined levels, is published in Computer Physics Communications.
2020-07-16 Simulations can be initialised and advanced from Python. #286
2020-05-29 First 1D run on two levels: an Alfvén wave crossing a fixed refined patch.
2019-12-04 HDF5 diagnostics for electromagnetic fields, ion moments and particles. #69

Work in progress

to validate

in review Physical boundary conditions #1318
in review Higher-order field refinement at level boundaries #1278
in review Prescribed external fields #1327
draft MHD and hybrid levels in one simulation #1309
draft Multithreading #1324

Week-by-week development activity: activity reports.