Welcome to the Magritte repository! Magritte is a open-source software library for simulating radiation transport, developed at University College London (UCL, UK) and KU Leuven (Belgium).

Magritte is currently mainly used for post-processing hydrodynamical simulations of astrophysical models by creating synthetic observations, but the techniques could in principle also be applied more general (e.g. plasma and nuclear physics).

It can either be used as a Python package or as a C++ library. Magritte uses a deterministic ray-tracer with a formal solver that currently focusses on line radiative transfer (see De Ceuster et al. 2019 for more details). The plot below shows synthetic observations made with Magritte at three different inclinations for a hydro simulation of the stellar wind around an asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star as it is perturbed by a companion.

The hydro model was created by Jan Bolte using MPI-AMRVAC. See the examples in the documentation to learn how these synthetic observations were created with Magritte.

Documentation

Please find our online documentation here. In particular, see our quickstart documentation for a quick intro.

Papers about Magritte

The following list of papers might provide further insights in the inner workings of Magritte:

• Magritte II: Adaptive ray-tracing, mesh construction and reduction (arXiv, MNRAS);
• Magritte I: Non-LTE atomic and molecular line modelling (arXiv, MNRAS);
• 3D Line Radiative Transfer & Synthetic Observations with Magritte (JOSS).

Please note that some features presented in these papers might not yet be implemented and documented in the latest release of Magritte.

Issues & Contact

Please report any issues with Magritte or its documentation here. If you need any further help, please contact Thomas Ceulemans or Frederik De Ceuster.

Cite

Please contact the authors of the papers referenced above if you want to use Magritte in your research. We are currently working on documentation and examples to facilitate its independent use. Until then, please contact us.

Developers & Contributors

Developers

• Frederik De Ceuster
• Thomas Ceulemans

Scientific & Technical advisors

• Ward Homan
• Jan Bolte
• Jeremy Yates
• Leen Decin
• Peter Boyle
• James Hetherington

Contributors

• Jolien Malfait
• Silke Maes
• Mats Esseldeurs
• Atulit Srivastava
• Arnout Coenegrachts
• Owen Vermeulen

Acknowledgements

FDC was for most of the development supported by the EPSRC iCASE studentship programme, Intel Corporation and Cray Inc, and is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO). FDC, JB, WH, and LD acknowledge support from the ERC consolidator grant 646758 AEROSOL. TC is a PhD Fellow of the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO).