About PhoSim
PhoSim was created by Garrett Jernigan & John Peterson. Extensive R&D work and prototyping was done to determine whether photon Monte Carlo methodology could be applied to simulating astronomical images of optical & near IR survey telescopes. A number of algorithmic experiments were done 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 was 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:
Peterson, J. R., Jernigan, J. G., Kahn, S. M., Rasmussen, A., Peng, E., Ahmad, Z., Bankert, J., Chang, C., Claver, C., Gilmore, K., Grace, E., Hannel, M., Hodge, M., Lorenz, S., Lupu, A., Meert, A., Nagarajan, S., Todd, N., Winans, A., Young, M. 2015, ApJS 218, 14.
After this work, PhoSim has been routinely released with tagged versions and advertised publicly. 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. The numerical efficiency has been drastically improved, the porting to large scale computing has been optimized, the calculations are multi-threaded to take advantage of multiple cores, and the physics has been asymptotically improved and made more self-consistent.
In addition, recently, the ab intio 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).
The physics of the deformation of optics is described in:
Peterson, J. R., Peng, E., Burke, C. J., Sembroski, G., Cheng, J. 2019, ApJ 873, 98.
A number of new capabilities expanded the physics in:
Burke, C. J., Peterson, J. R., Egami, E., Leisenring, J. M., Sembroski, G. H., Rieke, M. J. 2019, SPIE JATIS 5(3), 038002.
The physics of sensor distortions is described in:
Peterson, J. R., O’Connor, P., Nomerotski, A., Magnier, E., Jernigan, J. G., Cheng, J., Cui, W., Peng, E., Rasmussen, A., Sembroski, G. 2020, ApJ 889, 22.
The self-consistent representation of the atmosphere and the relevant physics is described in:
Peterson, J. R., Sembroski, G., Dutta, A., Remocaldo, C. 2024, ApJ 964, 124.
Please contact John Peterson for further questions and collaborations.