Improve wording for particle weights

ComputationalRadiationPhysics / picongpu

Performance-Portable Particle-in-Cell Simulations for the Exascale Era :sparkles:

https://picongpu.readthedocs.io

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Improve wording for particle weights #2708

Open sbastrakov opened 6 years ago

sbastrakov commented 6 years ago

Discussion started in comments for #2705 .

Currently particle weighting is used consistently throughout code and documentation. I believe it is not such a good choice for two reasons:

weightis more natural than weighting
some classical PIC literature uses particle weighting to denote field interpolation stage, although modern literature does not really do that any more

An alternative is also particle factor, which I personally like more, but it seems to be not very popular.

ax3l commented 6 years ago

Thx for the thoughts, I have seen weight as the attribute in most PIC codes nowadays as well.

Could also change this in the openPMD ED-PIC extension.

Admittedly, I do not like factor either, since it is not descriptive. It's like calling the var of a switch (...) {} argument action or a value C in f(x) = C * x "constant" instead of "slope".

sbastrakov commented 6 years ago

Well, word 'factor' could be used in a sense of 'multiplier', which particle weight in PIC effectively is. But again, I understand my opinion on this matter is not the popular one.