The direct numerical simulations (DNS) for this paper were conducted using Basilisk (http://basilisk.fr/). As Basilisk is a free software program written in C, it can be readily installed on any Linux machine, and it should be straightforward to then run the driver code to re-produce the DNS from this paper. Given this, the numerical solutions presented in this paper are a result of many high-fidelity simulations, which each took approximately 24 CPU hours running between 4 to 8 cores. Hence the difficulty in reproducing the results should mainly be in the amount of computational resources it would take, so HPC resources will be required. The DNS in this paper were used to validate the presented analytical solutions, as well as extend the results to a longer timescale. Reproducing these numerical results will build confidence in these results, ensuring that they are independent of the system architecture they were produced on.
There are many applications to multi-MeV X-rays. Their penetrative properties make them good for scanning dense objects for industry, and their ionising properties can destroy tumours in radiotherapy. They are also around the energy of nuclear transitions, so they can trigger nuclear reactions to break down nuclear waste into medical isotopes, or to reveal smuggled nuclear-materials for port security. Laser-driven X-ray generation offers a compact and efficient way to create a bright source of X-rays, without having to construct a large synchrotron. To fully utilise this capability, work on optimising the target design and understanding the underlying X-ray mechanisms are essential. The hybrid-PIC code is in a unique position to model the full interaction, so its ease-of-use and reproducibility are crucial for this field to develop.
Most of the material is available through Jupyter notebooks in GitHub, and it should be easy to reproduce with the help of Binder. With the notebooks, you could experiment with different parameters to the ones analyzed in the paper. It also contains a large dataset of physical parameters of galaxies analysed in this work. We expect this work to be easily reproducible in the steps described in the repository.
If all went right, the analysis should be fully reproducible without the need to make any adjustments. The paper aims to find optimal locations for new parkruns, but we were not 100% sure how 'optimal' should be defined. We provide a few examples, but the code was meant to be flexible enough to allow potential decision makers to specify their own, alternative objectives. The spatial data set is also quite interesting and fun to play around with. Cave: The full analysis takes a while to run (~30+ min) and might require >= 8gb ram.