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

2026-10-22 MHD open, reflecting and inflow boundaries
2026-10-16 Particle splitting corrected to Smets et al. (2021); refined 2D results change
2026-10-12 Second-order mesh refinement in space and time, divergence-free B
2026-09-30 MHD adaptive time stepping
2026-06-13 Finite-volume MHD solver, 1D, 2D and 3D
2026-04-07 3D hybrid runs with mesh refinement
2026-02-17 VTK-HDF output, readable by ParaView
2024-07-22 Dynamic load balancing across MPI ranks
2024 PHARE method paper, Computer Physics Communications
2022-06-21 2D automatic refinement
2022-03-07 Checkpoint and restart
2021-07-07 2D hybrid runs with mesh refinement
2021-01-15 1D automatic refinement on magnetic field gradients
2020-11-20 First 1D run with self-consistent refinement
2020-11-07 Particle splitting paper (Smets et al.), Computer Physics Communications
2020-07-16 Python interface to set up and run simulations
2020-05-29 First two-level 1D run: Alfvén wave through a refined patch
2019-12-04 HDF5 output: fields, ion moments, particles

Work in progress

to validate

in review External magnetic field
in review Ion-ion collisions
in review Choice of refinement criterion, including Löhner's
in review Installation with pip
draft MHD and hybrid levels in one run
draft Multithreading

Week-by-week development activity: activity reports.