Fields in yt¶

Fields are spatially-dependent quantities associated with a parent dataset. Examples of fields are gas density, gas temperature, particle mass, etc. The fundamental way to query data in yt is to access a field, either in its raw form (by examining a data container) or a processed form (derived quantities, projections, and so on). “Field” is something of a loaded word, as it can refer to quantities that are defined everywhere, which we refer to as “mesh” or “fluid” fields, or discrete points that populate the domain, traditionally thought of as “particle” fields. The word “particle” here is gradually falling out of favor, as these discrete fields can be any type of sparsely populated data.

What are fields?¶

Fields in yt are denoted by a two-element tuple, of the form (field_type, field_name). The first element, the “field type” is a category for a field. Possible field types used in yt include gas (for fluid mesh fields defined on a mesh) or io (for fields defined at particle locations). Field types can also correspond to distinct particle of fluid types in a single simulation. For example, a plasma physics simulation using the Particle in Cell method might have particle types corresponding to electrons and ions. See Field types known to yt below for more info about field types in yt.

The second element of field tuples, the “field name”, denotes the specific field to select, given the field type. Possible field names include density, velocity_x or pressure — these three fields are examples of field names that might be used for a fluid defined on a mesh. Examples of particle fields include particle_mass, particle_position, or particle_velocity_x. In general, particle field names are prefixed by “particle_”, which makes it easy to distinguish between a particle field or a mesh field when no field type is provided.

What fields are available?¶

We provide a full list of fields that yt recognizes by default at Field List. If you want to create additional custom derived fields, see Creating Derived Fields.

Every dataset has an attribute, ds.fields. This attribute possesses attributes itself, each of which is a “field type,” and each field type has as its attributes the fields themselves. When one of these is printed, it returns information about the field and things like units and so on. You can use this for tab-completing as well as easier access to information.

As an example, you might browse the available fields like so:

print(dir(ds.fields))
print(dir(ds.fields.gas))
print(ds.fields.gas.density)


On an Enzo dataset, the result from the final command would look something like this::

Alias Field for "('enzo', 'Density')" (gas, density): (units: g/cm**3)


You can use this to easily explore available fields, particularly through tab-completion in Jupyter/IPython.

It’s also possible to iterate over the list of fields associated with each field type. For example, to print all of the 'gas' fields, one might do:

for field in ds.fields.gas:
print(field)


You can also check if a given field is associated with a field type using standard python syntax:

# these examples evaluate to True for a dataset that has ('gas', 'density')
'density' in ds.fields.gas
('gas', 'density') in ds.fields.gas
ds.fields.gas.density in ds.fields.gas


For a more programmatic method of accessing fields, you can utilize the ds.field_list, ds.derived_field_list and some accessor methods to gain information about fields. The full list of fields available for a dataset can be found as the attribute field_list for native, on-disk fields and derived_field_list for derived fields (derived_field_list is a superset of field_list). You can view these lists by examining a dataset like this:

ds = yt.load("my_data")
print(ds.field_list)
print(ds.derived_field_list)


By using the field_info() class, one can access information about a given field, like its default units or the source code for it.

ds = yt.load("my_data")
ds.index
print(ds.field_info["gas", "pressure"].get_units())
print(ds.field_info["gas", "pressure"].get_source())


Using fields to access data¶

The primary use of fields in yt is to access data from a dataset. For example, if I want to use a data object (see Data Objects for more detail about data objects) to access the ('gas', 'density') field, one can do any of the following:

ad = ds.all_data()

# just a field name

# field tuple with no parentheses

# full field tuple

# through the ds.fields object


The first data access example is the simplest. In that example, the field type is inferred from the name of the field. The next two examples use the field type explicitly, this might be necessary if there is more than one field type with a “density” field defined in the same dataset. The third example is slightly more verbose but is syntactically identical to the second example due to the way indexing works in the Python language.

The final example uses the ds.fields object described above. This way of accessing fields lends itself to interactive use, especially if you make heavy use of IPython’s tab completion features. Any of these ways of denoting the ('gas', 'density') field can be used when supplying a field name to a yt data object, analysis routines, or plotting and visualization function.

Accessing Fields without a Field Type¶

In previous versions of yt, there was a single mechanism of accessing fields on a data container – by their name, which was mandated to be a single string, and which often varied between different code frontends. yt 3.0 allows for datasets containing multiple different types of fluid fields, mesh fields, particles (with overlapping or disjoint lists of fields). However, to preserve backward compatibility and make interactive use simpler, yt will still accept field names given as a string and will try to infer the field type given a field name.

As an example, we may be in a situation where have multiple types of particles which possess the particle_position field. In the case where a data container, here called ad (short for “all data”) contains a field, we can specify which particular particle type we want to query:

print(ad["dark_matter", "particle_position"])


Each of these three fields may have different sizes. In order to enable falling back on asking only for a field by the name, yt will use the most recently requested field type for subsequent queries. (By default, if no field has been queried, it will look for the special field all, which concatenates all particle types.) For example, if I were to then query for the velocity:

print(ad["particle_velocity"])


it would select black_holes as the field type, since the last field accessed used that field type.

The same operations work for fluid and mesh fields. As an example, in some cosmology simulations, we may want to examine the mass of particles in a region versus the mass of gas. We can do so by examining the special “deposit” field types (described below) versus the gas fields:

print(ad["deposit", "dark_matter_density"] / ad["gas", "density"])


The deposit field type is a mesh field, so it will have the same shape as the gas density. If we weren’t using deposit, and instead directly querying a particle field, this wouldn’t work, as they are different shapes. This is the primary difference, in practice, between mesh and particle fields – they will be different shapes and so cannot be directly compared without translating one to the other, typically through a “deposition” or “smoothing” step.

How are fields implemented?¶

There are two classes of fields in yt. The first are those fields that exist external to yt, which are immutable and can be queried – most commonly, these are fields that exist on disk. These will often be returned in units that are not in a known, external unit system (except possibly by design, on the part of the code that wrote the data), and yt will take every effort possible to use the names by which they are referred to by the data producer. The default field type for mesh fields that are “on-disk” is the name of the code frontend. (For example, art, enzo, pyne, and so on.) The default name for particle fields, if they do not have a particle type affiliated with them, is io.

The second class of field is the “derived field.” These are fields that are functionally defined, either ab initio or as a transformation or combination of other fields. For example, when dealing with simulation codes, often the fields that are evolved and output to disk are not the fields that are the most relevant to researchers. Rather than examining the internal gas energy, it is more convenient to think of the temperature. By applying one or multiple functions to on-disk quantities, yt can construct new derived fields from them. Derived fields do not always have to relate to the data found on disk; special fields such as x, y, phi and dz all relate exclusively to the geometry of the mesh, and provide information about the mesh that can be used elsewhere for further transformations.

There is a third, borderline class of field in yt, as well. This is the “alias” type, where a field on disk (for example, (frontend, Density)) is aliased into an internal yt-name (for example, (gas, density)). The aliasing process allows universally-defined derived fields to take advantage of internal names, and it also provides an easy way to address what units something should be returned in. If an aliased field is requested (and aliased fields will always be lowercase, with underscores separating words) it will be returned in the units specified by the unit system of the database (see Unit Systems for a guide to using the different unit systems in yt), whereas if the frontend-specific field is requested, it will not undergo any unit conversions from its natural units. (This rule is occasionally violated for fields which are mesh-dependent, specifically particle masses in some cosmology codes.)

Field types known to yt¶

Recall that fields are formally accessed in two parts: (‘field type‘, ‘field name‘). Here we describe the different field types you will encounter:

• frontend-name – Mesh or fluid fields that exist on-disk default to having the name of the frontend as their type name (e.g., enzo, flash, pyne and so on). The units of these types are whatever units are designated by the source frontend when it writes the data.
• index – This field type refers to characteristics of the mesh, whether that mesh is defined by the simulation or internally by an octree indexing of particle data. A few handy fields are x, y, z, theta, phi, radius, dx, dy, dz and so on. Default units are in CGS.
• gas – This is the usual default for simulation frontends for fluid types. These fields are typically aliased to the frontend-specific mesh fields for grid-based codes or to the deposit fields for particle-based codes. Default units are in the unit system of the dataset (see Unit Systems for more information).
• particle type – These are particle fields that exist on-disk as written by individual frontends. If the frontend designates names for these particles (i.e. particle type) those names are the field types. Additionally, any particle unions or filters will be accessible as field types. Examples of particle types are Stars, DM, io, etc. Like the front-end specific mesh or fluid fields, the units of these fields are whatever was designated by the source frontend when written to disk.
• io – If a data frontend does not have a set of multiple particle types, this is the default for all particles.
• all – This is a special particle field type that represents a concatenation of all particle field types using Particle Unions.
• deposit – This field type refers to the deposition of particles (discrete data) onto a mesh, typically to compute smoothing kernels, local density estimates, counts, and the like. See Deposited Particle Fields for more information.

While it is best to be explicit access fields by their full names (i.e. (‘field type‘, ‘field name‘)), yt provides an abbreviated interface for accessing common fields (i.e. ‘field name‘). In the abbreviated case, yt will assume you want the last field type accessed. If you haven’t previously accessed a field type, it will default to field type = 'all' in the case of particle fields and field type = 'gas' in the case of mesh fields.

Field Plugins¶

Derived fields are organized via plugins. Inside yt are a number of field plugins, which take information about fields in a dataset and then construct derived fields on top of them. This allows them to take into account variations in naming system, units, data representations, and most importantly, allows only the fields that are relevant to be added. This system will be expanded in future versions to enable much deeper semantic awareness of the data types being analyzed by yt.

The field plugin system works in this order:

• Available, inherent fields are identified by yt
• The list of enabled field plugins is iterated over. Each is called, and new derived fields are added as relevant.
• Any fields which are not available, or which throw errors, are discarded.
• Remaining fields are added to the list of derived fields available for a dataset
• Dependencies for every derived field are identified, to enable data preloading

Field plugins can be loaded dynamically, although at present this is not particularly useful. Plans for extending field plugins to dynamically load, to enable simple definition of common types (divergence, curl, etc), and to more verbosely describe available fields, have been put in place for future versions.

The field plugins currently available include:

• Angular momentum fields for particles and fluids
• Astrophysical fields, such as those related to cosmology
• Vector fields for fluid fields, such as gradients and divergences
• Particle vector fields
• Magnetic field-related fields
• Species fields, such as for chemistry species (yt can recognize the entire periodic table in field names and construct ionization fields as need be)

Magnetic Fields¶

Magnetic fields require special handling, because their dimensions are different in different systems of units, in particular between the CGS and MKS (SI) systems of units. Superficially, it would appear that they are in the same dimensions, since the units of the magnetic field in the CGS and MKS system are gauss ($$\rm{G}$$) and tesla ($$\rm{T}$$), respectively, and numerically $$1~\rm{G} = 10^{-4}~\rm{T}$$. However, if we examine the base units, we find that they do indeed have different dimensions:

$\begin{split}\rm{1~G = 1~\frac{\sqrt{g}}{\sqrt{cm}\cdot{s}}} \\ \rm{1~T = 1~\frac{kg}{A\cdot{s^2}}}\end{split}$

It is easier to see the difference between the dimensionality of the magnetic field in the two systems in terms of the definition of the magnetic pressure:

$\begin{split}p_B = \frac{B^2}{8\pi}~\rm{(cgs)} \\ p_B = \frac{B^2}{2\mu_0}~\rm{(MKS)}\end{split}$

where $$\mu_0 = 4\pi \times 10^{-7}~\rm{N/A^2}$$ is the vacuum permeability. yt automatically detects on a per-frontend basis what units the magnetic should be in, and allows conversion between different magnetic field units in the different unit systems as well. To determine how to set up special magnetic field handling when designing a new frontend, check out Creating Aliases for Magnetic Fields.

Particle Fields¶

Naturally, particle fields contain properties of particles rather than grid cells. By examining the particle field in detail, you can see that each element of the field array represents a single particle, whereas in mesh fields each element represents a single mesh cell. This means that for the most part, operations cannot operate on both particle fields and mesh fields simultaneously in the same way, like filters (see Filtering your Dataset). However, many of the particle fields have corresponding mesh fields that can be populated by “depositing” the particle values onto a yt grid as described below.

Field Parameters¶

Certain fields require external information in order to be calculated. For example, the radius field has to be defined based on some point of reference and the radial velocity field needs to know the bulk velocity of the data object so that it can be subtracted. This information is passed into a field function by setting field parameters, which are user-specified data that can be associated with a data object. The set_field_parameter() and get_field_parameter() functions are used to set and retrieve field parameter values for a given data object. In the cases above, the field parameters are center and bulk_velocity respectively – the two most commonly used field parameters.

ds = yt.load("my_data")



If a field parameter is not set, get_field_parameter will return None. Within a field function, these can then be retrieved and used in the same way.

def _wicket_density(field, data):
n_wickets = data.get_field_parameter("wickets")
if n_wickets is None:
# use a default if unset
n_wickets = 88
return data["gas", "density"] * n_wickets


For a practical application of this, see Radial Velocity Profile.

yt provides a way to compute gradients of spatial fields using the add_gradient_fields() method. If you have a spatially-based field such as density or temperature, and want to calculate the gradient of that field, you can do it like so:

ds = yt.load("GasSloshing/sloshing_nomag2_hdf5_plt_cnt_0150")


where the grad_fields list will now have a list of new field names that can be used in calculations, representing the 3 different components of the field and the magnitude of the gradient, e.g., "temperature_gradient_x", "temperature_gradient_y", "temperature_gradient_z", and "temperature_gradient_magnitude". To see an example of how to create and use these fields, see Complicated Derived Fields.

Note

add_gradient_fields currently only supports Cartesian geometries!

General Particle Fields¶

Every particle will contain both a particle_position and particle_velocity that tracks the position and velocity (respectively) in code units.

Deposited Particle Fields¶

In order to turn particle (discrete) fields into fields that are deposited in some regular, space-filling way (even if that space is empty, it is defined everywhere) yt provides mechanisms for depositing particles onto a mesh. These are in the special field-type space deposit, and are typically of the form ("deposit", "particletype_depositiontype") where depositiontype is the mechanism by which the field is deposited, and particletype is the particle type of the particles being deposited. If you are attempting to examine the cloud-in-cell (cic) deposition of the all particle type, you would access the field ("deposit", "all_cic").

yt defines a few particular types of deposition internally, and creating new ones can be done by modifying the files yt/geometry/particle_deposit.pyx and yt/fields/particle_fields.py, although that is an advanced topic somewhat outside the scope of this section. The default deposition types available are:

• count - this field counts the total number of particles of a given type in a given mesh zone. Note that because, in general, the mesh for particle datasets is defined by the number of particles in a region, this may not be the most useful metric. This may be made more useful by depositing particle data onto an Arbitrary Grids Objects.
• density - this field takes the total sum of particle_mass in a given mesh field and divides by the volume.
• mass - this field takes the total sum of particle_mass in each mesh zone.
• cic - this field performs cloud-in-cell interpolation (see Section 2.2 for more information) of the density of particles in a given mesh zone.
• smoothed - this is a special deposition type. See discussion below for more information, in SPH Fields.

SPH Fields¶

For gas particles from SPH simulations, each particle will typically carry a field for the smoothing length h, which is roughly equivalent to (m/\rho)^{1/3}, where m and rho are the particle mass and density respectively. This can be useful for doing neighbour finding.

As a note, SPH fields are special cases of the “deposited” particle fields. They contain an additional piece of information about what is being examined, and any fields that are recognized as being identical to intrinsic yt fields will be aliased. For example, in a Gadget dataset, the smoothed density of Gas particles will be aliased to the mesh field ("gas", "density") so that operations conducted on the mesh field density (which are frequent occurrences) will operate on the smoothed gas density from the SPH particles.

The special deposition types based on smoothing (smoothed) are defined in the file yt/geometry/particle_smooth.pyx, and they require non-local operations defined on a variable number of neighbors. The default smoothing type utilizes a cubic spline kernel and uses 64 nearest neighbors, providing a volume-normalized smoothing. Other types are possible, and yt provides functionality for many different types of non-local correlation between particles. (For instance, a friends-of-friends grouper has been built on this same infrastructure.)

Every particle field on a smoothed particle type is the source for a smoothed field; this is not always useful, but it errs on the side of extra fields, rather than too few fields. (For instance, it may be unlikely that the smoothed angular momentum field will be useful.) The naming scheme is an extension of the scheme described in Deposited Particle Fields, and is defined as such: ("deposit", "particletype_smoothed_fieldname"), where fieldname is the name of the field being smoothed. For example, smoothed Temperature of the Gas particle type would be ("deposit", "Gas_smoothed_Temperature"), which in most cases would be aliased to the field ("gas", "temperature") for convenience.

Other smoothing kernels besides the cubic spline one are available through a keyword argument kernel_name of the method add_smoothed_particle_field. Current available kernel names include:

• cubic, quartic, and quintic - spline kernels.
• wendland2, wendland4 and wendland6 - Wendland kernels.

The added smoothed particle field can be accessed by ("deposit", "particletype_kernelname_smoothed_fieldname") (except for the cubic spline kernel, which obeys the naming scheme given above).

Computing the Nth Nearest Neighbor¶

One particularly useful field that can be created is that of the distance to the Nth-nearest neighbor. This field can then be used as input to smoothing operations, in the case when a particular particle type does not have an associated smoothing length or other length estimate.

yt defines this field as a plugin, and it can be added like so:

import yt
from yt.fields.particle_fields import \

Note that fn here is the “field name” that yt adds. It will be of the form (ptype, nearest_neighbor_distance_NN) where NN is the integer. By default this is 64, but it can be supplied as the final argument to add_nearest_neighbor_field. For the example above, it would be nearest_neighbor_64.
This can then be used as input to the function add_volume_weighted_smoothed_field, which can enable smoothing particle types that would normally not be smoothed.