About

Particle-in-Cell (PIC) codes are used in almost all areas of plasma physics, such as fusion energy research, plasma accelerators, space physics, ion propulsion, and plasma processing, and many other areas. Leveraging on our expertise and experience from the development and use of the OSIRIS PIC code, we have developed a suite of 1D/2D fully relativistic electromagnetic PIC codes, as well as 1D electrostatic, named ZPIC. ZPIC is geared towards plasma physics education and researchers looking for a simple, easily customizable, PIC code.

The ZPIC codes can work as standalone programs, requiring only a C99 compiler (gcc works great!), or used as Python modules, in particular in Jupyter notebook environments. ZPIC codes do not depend on any external library, and have very modest hardware requirements, requiring only a standard laptop/desktop computer to be used.