This is a tutorial for PLUME. It will guide you through the setting up of some basic input files, the running of the code, and the basic output. For more details, we refer to the PLUME Input page and the PLUME Output pages.
Kristopher Klein (kgklein@arizona.edu)
Gregory Howes (gregory-howes@uiowa.edu)
Before starting with the steps described in this tutorial, we recommend that you familiarise yourself with the code paper.
Klein, K. G., Howes, G. G., and Brown, C. R., 2025
You don't need to go through all details, but it is certainly helpful to know what PLUME does and doesn't calculate. The code paper also explains the numerical techniques used in the code. We also recommend checking the Readme file.
This tutorial assumes that you have a working copy of PLUME on your computer, including all the required dependencies. You can find the installation guide here. Make sure you have a version of PLUME that compiled completely without error messages after typing.
make
For our first case, consider a simple scan over $k_\parallel \rho_{ref}$ for four solutions, the Slow, Alfven, Fast, and "entropy" (SAFE) modes.
These modes will be identified first by a map scan over a prescribed range of complex frequencies, and then followed along a logirithmic scan of $k_\parallel \rho_{ref}$ values.
./plume.e inputs/example/example_map_par.in
You can run this entire routine by moving to the
inputs/example
subdirectory and running the run_example.sh executable.
A similar calculation, with a map scan over a prescribed range of complex frequencies, and then followed along a logirithmic scan of $k_\perp \rho_{ref}$ values, can be performed via
./plume.e inputs/example/example_map_perp.in
To illustrate a double scan over a plane in $|k| \rho_{ref}$ and $\theta$, run
./plume.e inputs/example/example_guess_double.in
which will vary the two parameters in tandem.
Assuming you have gnuplot installed on your computer, move to the
plotter/example
subdirectory and run
./cycle.sh
which executes a bash script to plot the dispersion surface map and identified solutions from the example_map_par.in calculation.
If you would like to see the $k_\parallel \rho_p$ scans of the four identified solutions, uncomment out the
input='example_kpar'
line in cycle.sh and rerun the script.
This will construct a plot of $\omega_{r}}/\Omega_p$ (top row), $\gamma/Omega_p$ (second row), $\gamma_p/\omega_{r}$ (third row), $\gamma_e/\omega_{r}$ (fourth row), and the degree of elliptical polarization of the $x$ and $y$ components of the electric field.