PhoSim v6.3 is available!

About PhoSim

Jesse Garrett Jernigan Jr.

Photo Credits: Lynn Cominsky

PhoSim was created by Garrett Jernigan & John Peterson. Extensive R&D and prototyping were conducted to determine whether photon Monte Carlo methodology could be applied to simulate astronomical images from optical & near IR survey telescopes. Several algorithmic experiments were conducted to describe the appropriate numerical physics.

PhoSim was then constructed over several years. During construction, all the major physics that affect the propagation of light through the atmosphere, telescope, and camera were implemented in the photon Monte Carlo methodology in PhoSim. PhoSim was also built for both desktop/laptop and large-scale grid computing environments, and a substantial validation framework, including unit, integration, and regression testing, was constructed. This work is described in:

Since this work, PhoSim has been released routinely with tagged versions and advertised publicly since 2018. PhoSim has been validated in detail with real data, generalized to implement different telescopes, generalized to include x-ray/UV/far-IR physics, modified to both simplify and expand the user interfaces, and has acquired a large user base. Numerical efficiency has been drastically improved; porting to large-scale computing has been optimized; calculations are multi-threaded to take advantage of multiple cores; and the physics has been asymptotically improved and made more self-consistent.

In addition, the ab initio physics detail has been significantly expanded to not just include the photon/electron interactions, but also the physics of the objects that the light is interacting with (e.g. atmosphere, optics, sensors).

John Peterson

Photo Credits: Purdue

Please contact John Peterson for further questions and potential collaborations.

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