Add a particle stepper for given external fields about plasmapy HOT 5 CLOSED

This sounds wonderful! With regards to interpolation, the method I'm most familiar with is trilinear interpolation (e.g., Haynes & Parnell, 2007). I suspect that some of the interpolation routines in SciPy would do pretty much what we need them to do (e.g., RegularGridInterpolator).

Another thought related to interpolation is that we should allow for flexibility in terms of the interpolation method which we'll eventually need. If we want to push test particles in a spectral or spectral element simulation, the most accurate way to interpolate would be to use the basis functions of the solution directly. However, we do not need to do this yet.

A simple test would be to match against analytical results for a particle orbit in a uniform magnetic field. Another possibility for a test would be to match particle drifts in simple configurations.

Thank you!

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... so this was implemented in scipy all along?

Well.

I really do need to read the full docs of that, scipy keeps positively surprising me.

Thank you very much for the heads up, this will definitely come in handy!

I'll try to make the interpolation easy to swap out.

Uniform mag fields are definitely one of the tests I'm considering; another would be a harmonic potential. The drifts are a neat idea. Thanks!

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Okay, a minor point of confusion. I started doing some minor work on porting my code, and I'm noticing that we don't actually have an electric field defined in the plasma class. I know, quasineutrality, everything runs on magnetic in MHD scenarios, but in this case this means I'm kind of at a loss on how to proceed for now. I can't really interpolate a non-existant electric field.

I had the idea of interpolating not the fields, but the actual momentum - scale that to the particle mass and we get a velocity for the particle. But that seems like a hack, like something you would implement in a video game where you don't actually care about the physics involved.

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Hm...some options would be to have the electric field either inputted directly, or calculated from an Ohm's law. @SolarDrew, do you have thoughts on how to address this?

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Hey, just wanted to give a heads up that I still intend to get this done, but other commitments are kind of getting in the way right now. I hope I can get back to this soon.

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